Hey tech wizards! I’m (stil) having some issues with the back end of the blog and could really use some advice and/or help from someone who knows about web hosting/internet stuff.
Is that you? Please email me (dfutrelle@gmail) or send a Twitter DM and I’ll give you the gory details.
Thanks!
–DF
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Tell me about it. I’ve spent literally the entire day being shat on from a great height. Let’s see:
* My “morning” catch-up on news and various things is still incomplete at 9:00 PM. PM. This due to various websites being extremely slow to load or otherwise uncooperative, even though I’m doing the exact same things to load them that I did yesterday, the day before, and every single freaking day for the past several years in most cases. At this point it looks like my entire day will be a write-off due to this alone.
* Game on phone has been randomly cheating me out of in-game swag, bling, and kaching I’d earned. Of course I’m spending more time on it than usual today while waiting for interminable loading wheels and such on the PC.
* Speaking of which, I do Windoze Update shortly before the Patch Tuesday of each month, so that the previous month’s patches will have had time to be recalled and fixed if (when) Microsoft screwed them up. It is taking forever to load “2022-01 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 21H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5009543)”, which I’ve discovered is because the fucking thing is over half a fucking gigabyte. This is supposed to be a security patch, not a full replacement operating system!
* Inexplicably, tonight’s “Young Sheldon” was a repeat, despite February being a sweeps month where they’re supposed to air new episodes each week of all of the shows for which they are still making new episodes. That’s actually the best out of the bunch: all of my other Thursday shows are missing completely, as in I can’t find the damn things at all, with manual or keyword searches on my set-top box. It’s like the television gods have forgotten what day of the fucking week it is and think it’s still Wednesday, or something! Or, given how little of anything seems to be on, perhaps Saturday or Sunday.
The question this naturally raises is: Why am I hated so? It isn’t even just specific people; it’s like the universe itself has it in for me, and particularly today for some reason. All of the above represent nominally separate and independent failures. Why would they all happen at once, instead of at randomly spaced-out times over a period of weeks or months?
The only explanation I’ve ever been able to come up with for a certain subset of my experiences is that I managed, in my youth, to piss off someone influential.
I don’t mean has-a-newspaper-column influential. I don’t even mean has-the-ears-of-billionaires-and-presidents influential. I mean their-opinions-shape-the-very-fabric-of-reality-itself influential. So, if this person sees me as, say, an incompetent buffoon, the world will bend and twist itself to act as if I am, regardless of my own choices and regardless of how skilled I am at a thing or how much time and effort I put into it — and also regardless of how bone-simple and no-brainer the task itself is supposed to be. So I could learn everything there is to know about, say, software engineering, and nothing I wrote would work or even compile; if I tried to play Tic-Tac-Toe I’d lose to a 4-year-old; a simple task like “click refresh and read the new posts at $(WEBSITE)” would somehow elude me, and if I did eventually succeed, it would take me 10 hours instead of 10 minutes to do so. Like the universe itself is gaslighting me.
This only occurs intermittently, mind you. Which is how I can know I actually am skilled at the things I’m skilled at that actually require any skill — normally I succeed at them in the manner expected of a skilled practitioner. Except during this influential person‘s temper-tantrums, during which the universe will give me precisely the feedback in response to my efforts that it would give a cack-handed amateur, in contradiction of my efforts and its own past feedback on my previous occasions of performing the self-same tasks.
Of course, the obvious question is: who exactly holds this negative opinion of me? Where are they? The problem is they could be anywhere. Even an extraterrestrial five billion light-years away for all I know, were it not for the fact that, to have formed an opinion of me, they must on some past occasion have met me. I think. If I did identify the responsible party, though, there’d then be the question of what the hell to do about the situation. Obviously I’d start by trying to convince them their first impression of me lo those many decades ago was wrong. But what if they proved to be a stubborn cuss, unwilling to entertain the notion that maybe they were wrong about something? I have a right to exist free of … whatever it is that happens when they think negative thoughts about me. I don’t think anyone should have that sort of influence, or even the more ordinary sort of influence that lets wealthy white men get away with nearly anything, but I’ve no clue how to fix the latter problem, let alone the former as well.
So here I am, being shat on from a great height, all because … I don’t even know what, exactly. Maybe I didn’t shake someone’s hand or use the correct form of polite address with someone, one time, way back when I was like 6 or something and didn’t know any better anyway. And for this apparently I am cursed for life, or at least until that idiot eventually croaks … if, that is, their strange reality-influence doesn’t include immortality as part of the deal.
And it’s paginating prematurely again!
@ surplus
I totally get that this is a bit frustrating for you. But David is doing his best to get things sorted for us all; and he’s only got a kind volunteer to help him. I’m sure this is even more frustrating for him. We just get to enjoy posts here; but this is David’s livelihood. So let’s just give him a bit of breathing space eh? I’m sure things will be sorted just as soon as that’s possible and, like the JWST, well worth the wait!
In the interim…
Did I mention that that half-gig Windoze Update is downloading at much less than the width of my down-pipe? Like, about 10% of its capacity or so. Don’t know why. It’s not contention from other apps. The network monitor here shows very little other usage. It’s like it’s just not choosing to download at the maximum speed it could get, “because fuck you, that’s why” …
And now it’s stuck at “Downloading – 100%”. Assuming it rounds up, it’s within 1% of actually-done. The actual file size is six hundred something megs, so conservatively assume 700. The remaining portion should be no more than 7MB, then. The throughput on the network monitor has been holding steady at 33KB/s, which should take 3 seconds to send 100K, half a minute to send a meg, and less than five to send 7.
It’s been in this state for at least half an hour now.
So, the percentage is lying to me, or the network throughput is lying to me, and in either case the actual remaining time could be God-fucking-knows …
It finally finished downloading. Going to reboot. If I don’t come back, let the others know that it was Microsoft that got me in the end.
Well, the site is more or less fixed and should run smoother once it’s moved to the fancy dancy VPS I got for it. After that, I’ll get to fixing the layout/formatting/etc
The top post has returned as well.
@ Surplus to Requirements
Those are trivial “First World problems”. The news? TV shows? Shit happens. If you spent more time paying attention to other people, you’d realize it happens to everyone to some degree or another. Say, for example, some people blog for a living and have problems with their websites, end up with people mad at them over it and stuff like that.
@DrVanNostrand
Well, as the old saying goes, the wheel was spinning, but the hamsters were dead, so they were replaced by only slightly larger fuzzy critters with increased cuteness capacity.
They’re also pretty good at that wheel thing.
I think I’d prefer, if possible, actual page numbers rather than just clicking on a link to older comments. Reading some old entries, especially if there’s a troll in the comments section, they can span several pages and it can be a little exhausting trying to click back through them all.
@DrVanNostrand
Well, as the old saying goes, the wheel was spinning, but the hamsters were dead, so they were replaced by only slightly larger fuzzy critters with increased cuteness capacity.
They’re also pretty good at that wheel thing.
I think I’d prefer, if possible, actually page numbers rather than just clicking on a link to older comments. Reading some old entries, especially if there’s a troll in the comments section, they can span several pages and it can be a little exhausting trying to click back through them all.
I’d like an “older comments” link too, if it doesn’t throw everything else out of whack.
Seriously @ Surplus to Requirements: your acting like the biggest Karen whenever the slightest inconvenience occurs and than attempt to engage in tinfoil chewing cognitive distortions and baseless conspiracy about how said inconvenience, especially those out of anyone’s immediate control or control period if people can’t snap their fingers and “fix” the issue like magic in a microsecond; is somehow some grand, elaborate conspiracy and intentional and malicious bid to somehow target you for nebulous, undefined and frankly rather inanely myopic, chauvinist reasons.
And you do this nonsense at the most innocuous, or mildly inconvenient and even outright nothing-burger first world problems while losing sight of actual problems other people actually have to deal with.
It shows a lack of any maturity or critical, objective and rational thought and frankly is to the point of being completely estranged from reality and stunningly self centered to the point of self aggrandizing. I’m convinced that if you stepped on a Lego that happened to be lying around; that you’d blame it on some made up malevolent yet undefined agent “out to get you” because… why?
For real; it’s become tiring that you do this kind of thing at any moment of inconvenience and trying to treat “inconvenience” as if it were “oppression” or “malicious conspiracy”.
You seriously need some grounded perspective and put this nonsense to bed.
Yay! The site is back! Thanks David!!
@TacticalProgressive:
Are you trying to blame all of those things on the weather?
A thunderstorm didn’t cause site outages in which the machine serving the site clearly still had power and internet, but refused to serve pages; that had to be a software problem. A thunderstorm didn’t cause the wrong TV shows to air in the wrong time slots. A thunderstorm didn’t cause a Microsoft security patch to be 10 to 100 times larger than it had any reasonable right to be. A thunderstorm didn’t cause Windoze Update, and only Windoze Update, to have abnormally low download speeds while everything else was as fast as normal.
None of those things resulted from “external forcings” from outside of the sphere of human affairs. Each of them resulted from people’s choices somewhere. Therefore your claim that they were “out of anyone’s control” is revealed as hogwash.
Because it’s the middle of winter, so all my windows are closed tight shut, and therefore the wind cannot have shifted it into my path; ergo it got there by someone’s choice rather than by any non-human influence. Unless a cat or dog is present. Then it might have been one of them that left it there. 🙂
@Surplus: Please stop expecting everyone else in the world to achieve some ridiculous level of perfection that I am 100% positive you can not yourself measure up to. Shit happens. No one hates you. No one spends that much time thinking about you. Websites go down. Servers run slow. Wifi can be shit (especially when everyone is working from home). Infrastructure degrades. It happens. You’re not that special and no one is after you. Everyone else deals with the same frustrations in their day to day life. We all just accept that it happens and get on with our lives.
REPOST: first attempt got eaten.
@TacticalProgressive:
Are you trying to blame all of those things on the weather?
A thunderstorm didn’t cause site outages in which the machine serving the site clearly still had power and internet, but refused to serve pages; that had to be a software problem. A thunderstorm didn’t cause the wrong TV shows to air in the wrong time slots. A thunderstorm didn’t cause a Microsoft security patch to be 10 to 100 times larger than it had any reasonable right to be. A thunderstorm didn’t cause Windoze Update, and only Windoze Update, to have abnormally low download speeds while everything else was as fast as normal.
None of those things resulted from “external forcings” from outside of the sphere of human affairs. Each of them resulted from people’s choices somewhere. Therefore your claim that they were “out of anyone’s control” is revealed as hogwash.
Because it’s the middle of winter, so all my windows are closed tight shut, and therefore the wind cannot have shifted it into my path; ergo it got there by someone’s choice rather than by any non-human influence. Unless a cat or dog is present. Then it might have been one of them that left it there. 🙂
Surplus, I’ve explained to you before that your local TV stations have NO CONTROL over what TV shows they air. ALL the stuff you like to watch comes from the US networks, and they can pre-empt or reschedule anything they damn well want to when they want to, for reasons entirely unrelated to you and even the entire country of Canada. But maybe you ignored me?
Look at the relevant US network schedule to see if reruns or pre-emptions are scheduled. Usually it’s because there’s a sporting event in the US that they don’t want to waste a new episode against, or the President speaks and throws the schedule off. They don’t even know you exist, and they barely acknowledge Canada.
Also, there’s this plague going on, maybe you’ve heard about it? It’s played havoc with TV show filming for a couple years now, and causes delays in the schedule. Sometimes the shows just aren’t ready in time.
I have never had a software update that gave an accurate percentage of updates. EVER. And I’ve been updating software since the 80s. Also, of course your internet’s slow when everyone’s inside their house keeping warm, surfing the net and streaming Netflix or whatever.
Finally, re-read what @Tactical Progressive wrote, and grow the fuck up. Look into mental health resources. Your pissy entitled paranoia makes you look exactly like the people WHTM makes fun of. EXACTLY.
@ gss ex-noob
Pfff. You were lucky. In my day updating software meant sending a carrier pigeon to Mr Babbage and asking him for an extra cog.
Well, maybe not that bad. But I do remember when updating an operating system involved sticking in EPROMs.
Which actually was a pretty fast way of doing it. We’ve regressed.
Another page says there are two new comments on this page, but when I follow the link here there’s no sign of either of them.
What the hell is going on?
And of course it gets eaten.
I’m about ready to start smashing things. This is the second day in a row where I can’t properly catch up here, thus delaying everything I had planned to do after catching up here, because of some damn glitch.
2021 was blissfully free of these kinds of problems. And of fucking Omicron. Can we have 2021 back, please? 😛
Everything I type into this thing just vanishes into the ether now. It was the comments that made this site great … if this is the end of that, I’m not even sure I want to go on living.
@ surplus
Please try to give David a bit of a break and some breathing space. The poor guy has enough on his plate trying to get things sorted technically (and thank you beneficent tech maven!) as well as producing content.
I know it’s frustrating for you; but good things come to those who wait eh?
A human told me this comment form doesn’t work. Being a naturally skeptical cat, and (of course) curious, I had to check.
In the words of my people: OH HAI!
Surplus, have you tried the workaround kupo gave you of loading from the recent posts and not recent comments?
Have you tried chilling the heck out?
If a comment doesn’t show up immediately, please try taking a break for a half hour or so. You may not intend it to come off this way, but when the rest of us see back-to-back-to-back comments from you, it sounds like you’re yelling at us or David and it’s rude as heck.
Things take time.
Nobody is perfect.
Nothing is perfect.
That doesn’t make the world bad, or mean people are out to get you.
I’m concerned that if you cannot find it in you to relax and cut the world some slack, you’re going to tear yourself apart in frustration. I don’t want that for you.
I also am getting real annoyed, because dude, 13 of the last 23 comments are you ranting, often with a ‘why’d it disappear’ when it’s right there! It just took more than a second! But it’s there!
Also, on the paginating front, David is allowed to try different numbers of comments! 50 was a little long, anyways. 20 or 25 could be real nice. I know differences can be hard to deal with. I know. Trust me.
But this is a blog. It’s nature is to change.