Liz, this is BDB. Please leave and do not come back. Stop mailing, stop signing up, stop posting, etc. stop offering “friendly advice” and stop stop stop.
I have no time for drama. I tried to respect your privacy, and that has not worked.
I wish you well, but somewhere else.
Please do not respond. This is as good as it gets, and it won’t be this good again. (Who can place that near-quote)?
Sorry for the difficulty, folks. I think I have it beat. The nice thing about a database connection error is that it points to the likely locus of the problem. Once it became a more permanent error than intermittent, it helped narrow down the likely causes. Also, I dusted off some old skills and dug into the thing.
Seems we’re up.
What follows is an anti-diversity manifesto from an engineer at Google. This guy will be fired, and then should run for public office.
NOTE: I drafted this when the news broke, on about 05 AUG. It needs re-formatting which I was halfway through when I was pulled away for a while on family business. More on this later.
I value diversity and inclusion, am not denying that sexism exists, and don’t endorse using stereotypes. When addressing the gap in representation in the population, we need to look at population level differences in distributions. If we can’t have an honest discussion about this, then we can never truly solve the problem. Psychological safety is built on mutual respect and acceptance, but unfortunately our … Continue reading
Thank you for the reports of blog issues. As far as I know, there were a couple of instances of weird page loads and “database connection” error messages. I suspect these were caused by server reboots or sommat at the host. I don’t see any strangeness about right now.
Even in small outfits, there are multiple servers to divide the workload not only work load balancing, but for segregation of roles (enhances manageability, security, scalability). These servers need to be synced to deliver the final product. When emergent maintenance (or poorly sequenced planned maintenance) disrupts the cooperation of these servers, the send error message back and forth.
You can only receive an error message from a server you can reach. Assume that when your request for a page … Continue reading
Just quickly, here is a grisly thought experiment.
How many legs is a life worth? “It’s a categorical difference — you cannot convert between the sacred value of lives and mere injury,” I hear you say. But that’s where you would be wrong.
Imagine a long line of people waiting upon your decision. Every person will have a leg amputated until you say, “Kill this one,” and then the bloodletting will cease. How long a line can you condemn to mutilation? if it is a single person, then choosing amputation over death is clearly a demonstration of your mercy. If two people, perhaps they can agree that they would both prefer to be amputees over one of them having to live with the knowledge that their leg cost … Continue reading
You may recall SNL’s Norm MacDonald doing a skit which announced the worst jobs of the year (which was also a thing in real news), and the previous year’s worst job — crack whore — had been bumped from its leading spot by the new year’s worst job — Assistant crack whore.
On a college campus somewhere, goats are taking groundskeepers’ jobs. That’s not the embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is that a union is fighting to disenfranchise the goats. That is what it has come to — the assistant crack whores of the university system are still being priced out of a job.
By ruminants.
No, not that sort of graphic. This is a family site. I mean using graphics in our text, pictures in our words.
I frequently add graphics to my posts to literally illustrate a point, or provide an ironic counterpoint, or for (say) cheap laughs. There is a great infrastructure to prevent this uncredited and unpaid use of another’s creative effort and execution. This eventually will change. Why? It is elementary, my dear Watson. That which cannot endure will end.
The use of the “Watson” quote above is uncontested — it serves to encapsulate more than the bare meaning of the words, but to provide connotation by dragging along context from another environment. We do this all the time with words, and in our new medium, we will do … Continue reading
Please let me know if you see any more ping spam. It should not happen anymore. I had turned off the options for trackbacks on new posts, but that did nothing to turn it off on old posts. Well that’s the label on the check box, and they do not give you another option.
So I turned off pingbacks on every single post, regardless of age. It was simpler that it seemed, but it’s a matter of finding it before you can do it.
Finally, MLH is not on the hook for technical problems. I do not want to wipe out a troublesome class of comments (or whatever) individually, by hand. That just hides the problem and “lets the terrorists win”. Tech problems get tech solutions … Continue reading
