The Saga Continues

Last week we reported the problems that a DDOS attack caused our websites, and the steps we took to defend against future attacks. When we set up the new redundant DNS server we were very aware that we had to be sure all of the DNS entries were duplicated between the two systems. Guess who forgot one! Not only that, but Murphy had to have his say and the only entry Jon missed turned out to be the only critical one during the final week of the Summit's early-registration period. The problem was soon spotted and resolved, but ...

All was going well and then the other shoe dropped. The load source on the IBM i model 270 running our websites started reporting faults. This was the second disk to go bad in the last month or so and, of course, the load-source disk is a little more problematic to replace than a regular drive, so ...

We did some frantic cleaning up to reduce the amount of data to be saved-off and the system thankfully limped along until the end of early registration. At that point our friend Paul Tuohy, who houses the system, saved the system, replaced the drive, restored everything and lo and behold we have a working system again. Whew!

Lesson of the week? Even with the legendary reliability of the IBM i, the little devil can still cause you grief when you can least afford it.

Now we're wondering what can possibly go wrong this week. We're already at least two weeks behind schedule due to all the recent problems; it would be nice to have a week that went smoothly. Keep your fingers crossed for us. 

Communicating

We've touched on this before, but lately it's been grating more and more, especially for Jon (Susan has other pet peeves!).

We can't recall the last time we read a complete magazine article, or piece on the Web, or posting on a forum, that didn't include at least some grammar and/or spelling error. The Web forum stuff we've become almost immune to, but magazines and newspapers used to employ editors to catch this stuff. Yet more and more of it seems to be slipping through. Perhaps it's a sign of the times with everyone cutting back on staffing. Or perhaps with texting and tweeting forcing such cryptic shorthand, the occasional spelling or grammar error is considered a nit in today's communication.

We were reminded of this this morning when our friend Trevor Perry posted on Facebook a link to an advertisement that included the immortal words "... sleep on it when your too lazy ..." Apparently the writer was too lazy to use a grammar checker. Perhaps we should be grateful that they spelled "too" correctly and didn't use "to" as we so often see these days.

Of course we're writing this in the full expectation someone will discover a grammatical error in this post ...

Does bad English annoy you? Or is "texting speak" acceptable to you? We'd really like to know. Perhaps we're just getting too old and cranky.