Category Archives: Stupidity plain and simple

Politics, Stupidity plain and simple

Alberta government stupidity continues unabated

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A helicopter accident occurred on the Slave Lake forest fire. The pilot was killed during an ongoing water bucketing operation. Transport Canada, the federal agency responsible for doing the accident investigation, has been unable to acquire a helicopter to retrieve the wrecked aircraft. It sits, on its back, in shallow water about 10 metres (30 feet) from shore, where it appears day-after-day on television.

Apparently, all of the available helicopters capable of lifting the damaged machine out of the water are being used in the area by Alberta to fight forest fires. They can’t be made available.

That is unbelievable!–especially given that some of those helicopters remain near to the incident, and are still involved in fire fighting operations. Do you mean to tell me that for the couple of hours needed, an aircraft can’t be made available to retrieve an aircraft that was involved in fighting the Slave Lake fire? In which a pilot was killed?

You’ve got to be kidding me.

The pilot was retrieved by some quick-thinking fire fighters, who were unable to resuscitate him onshore.

 

Politics, Stupidity plain and simple

More TSA stupidity

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Here’s Patrick Smith’s latest. It covers the recent TSA Code Bravo, freeze! bravado that turns adults into kindergarteners and tattle-tales. How marvelous that they all follow the pied pipers of doom–well, almost all.

… TSA doesn’t really have the authority to make anybody remain motionless. TSA guards do not have law enforcement power — much as the agency has done a good job at fooling people into believing otherwise. Screeners are now called “officers” and they wear blue shirts with badges. Not by accident, the badges look exactly like the kind worn by police. —Patrick Smith, salon.com

The theater of the absurd continues unabated.

Politics, Stupidity plain and simple

Morans

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CraziesWhilst perusing one of my favorite news and current events sites I came across this. I find 1.(a) particularly interesting. In future, will a presidential candidate be required to provide a viewing to prove that he is, indeed, circumcised? How presidential is that?

Given the reluctance of a large proportion of the population to accept a paper certificate as proof of being born in der Homeland, I’m thinking that it won’t be long before a Penis Eligibility Committee™ will be required under law to view the dubious member’s candidate candidate’s member.

I could go on and on, but what’s the point?

 

Stupidity plain and simple

Earth Hour stupidity

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Earth Hour mandates sitting in the dark. At night.

Why?

The northern hemisphere, of which I am an inhabitant, gets enough mandated darkness during the winter months. Does anyone really believe that sitting in the dark for an hour will do anything except contribute to a warm fuzzy feeling for the accomplishment of absolutely nothing meaningful?

Partygoers at last year’s worldwide event who didn’t want to sit in the dark at home were confronted by LED lanterns and flashlights, and could sit in the dark outside with others–if the LEDs were extinguished. Those in the less civilized parts of the world without access to modern amenities continued to participate by sitting in the dark. They must be commended for their diligence.

Does anyone think they dimmed their firepits?

Earth Hour.

What a concept.

Hardware/Software, Stupidity plain and simple

feedbooks.com is down

Update January 4, 2011: It appears as though the feedbooks site is now up and running as it should.

Update January 3, 2011: The current feedbook.com backup that has been installed is one made very late yesterday, prior to edits that I made online at the site. That leaves me wondering if feedbooks was using a RAID array, thinking that backups weren’t necessary because of the redundancy of RAID. If that’s the case, they must have received a huge shock.

There has been a total lack of communications from feedbooks.com regarding this debacle. One tweet saying they were having datacenter power outages, followed by a second a day later telling us that everything was back to normal when in fact it wasn’t, is not good business practice. In fact, nothing has been back to normal for two days since that last tweet, as evidenced by the partial backup installation now running, and the partial backups installed multiple times yesterday.

If you’ve done any online editing of your work over there in the last three days, you’d better download a copy to determine if it’s a current version. I’m thinking it won’t be. I shut down my two publications yesterday. I’ll be uploading fresh copies to replace the incorrect versions today. We’ll see how it goes from there.

It’s now 1500, January 3 in Paris and feedbooks is unavailable yet again. I wonder which backup they’re restoring this time.

It’s 0100 January 4 Paris time. Feedbooks is back up, but experiencing some outages so far, as it has done all day today. Still nothing on twitter, the book of faces or the blog about a major outage. I find that inconceivable, given Feedbooks huge audience. Absolutely ridiculous, and thumbing one’s nose at one’s lifeblood – customers. Free or not.

Second update January 2: They must have some serious problems going on beyond power failures. A completed book I had uploaded an  hour ago has been replaced in it’s entirety by a copy from early this morning, and is now unpublished. I’d say there’s more going on than servers with power failures if they’re restoring old backups this late in the game.

Yes, serious problems. Another work I had published has also been restored as a backup, and is minus the edits I made to it today. I can leave it up as is, but I’m wondering how many others there are in the same predicament but don’t know it because of the lack of communications from feedbooks.com.

When they’re resorting to restoring outdated backups there’s something very wrong going on.

If you’ve got work published there, I hope you all have current backups on your own computers.

The most recent tweet, now some hours old, says everything is fixed. That is so not true.

Yet another backup has been restored, and it too is out of date. Serious problems, folks.

I took my publications offline because of the unreliability of this outfit.

smashwords.com is starting to look pretty good.

Update January 2, 2011: It appears to be up (for now), but it’s virtually unusable for doing anything should you want to attempt any editing. I tried doing some last night, but it looks as though a backup has been installed, since all of the edits were gone this morning. Now I can’t do anything. At this time I wouldn’t recommend trying to edit, because the site keeps going down.

At best, editing remains spotty and unreliable, although it could be because of increased demand since the outage.

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All we get is a single tweet yesterday(December 31) morning saying feedbooks had power problems with their servers? Nothing on their blog. Nada. Rien.

Nothing on their book of faces page since December 28, when someone remarks that the online editor isn’t working and that feedbooks will fix it next week.

Next week?

WTF is with this place?

Is it a one-man operation running out of a basement in Paris or what?

When might it be back up? Tomorrow? Next week? Next year?

So much for communication in this age of enlightenment.