Canopyflyer

Reminds me of a major incident I got involved in. I was the Problem Manager and not MIM (Major Incident Management), but I’ve had years of MIM experience so was asked to help out on this one. The customer manufactured blood plasma and each of the lots on the production floor was worth a cool $1 million. The application that was down and had brought production down was not the app that actually handled production, but an application (service) that supplied data to it.

Of course the customer thought that app was not Mission Critical so it didn’t have redundancy. I joined the call and first thing I asked was when did the last change go through on this app… Spoiler: I had the change in front of me and it went in the previous night. The admin of the app speaks up that he did a change the previous night… And NO the MIM team had NOT looked at that change yet… Did I mention this was FOUR FUCKING HOURS into the outage? That is MIM 101. Something goes down, look to see who last fucked with it.

This is why you need experienced MIM people in enterprise environments.

So I took control of the MIM, instructed the App Admin to share his screen and walk us through the change he did the previous night… Two screens in and OH… Look at that… There’s a check box that put the app into read only (or something like that, this happened back in 2009 and I don’t remember all the details). I’d never seen the application before in my life, but knew that check box being checked, just based on the verbiage, could not be right… So I asked… The Admin, sounding embarrassed, said yeah he forgot to uncheck that box last night…

Fuck me.

He unchecked the box, bounced the app and what do you know… It started to work.

A single damn check box brought down the production line of a multi-billion dollar company.

My investigation for that Problem was a bit scathing to multiple levels of the customer. If a service supports a Tier 1 production app and that Tier 1 app would stop working if that service goes down… GUESS WHAT! That service is MISSION FUCKING CRITICAL and it should be supported as such. My employer was not on the hook for this one, as both applications involved were customer supported.

I would love to say that the above is an uncommon occurrence, but honestly it is the main reason for outages in my experience. Something small and stupid that is easily missed.

That photo is from when the gas main blew up right?

I was working at AmFam at the time.

That’s the same mother fucker I shut down on Reddit many years ago when he started popping off about how there is no reason for abortion in an AMA.

I simply replied to his idiotic statement:

Ectopic Pregnancy

1 in 40 chance

SOURCE

Sorry, I’ve since forgotten which article I cited in my original post. The word “SOURCE” was a link to an NIH article that I was citing. I can’t find it now and the original post is lost to my deleting my Reddit account.

But it was enough to cause the jack ass to back pedal and make a public announcement that abortion was OK for ectopic pregnancies specifically.

It was also my highest rated comment on Reddit ever.

Fuck Joe Walsh. He’s an asshole that should be no where near a public office of any kind.

The full story there is that we were at an Orthopedic urgent care. My wife has danced Ballet since she was 4. A bad jump resulted in a 5th metatarsal fracture, commonly referred to as a “dancer’s break” and a severely sprained ankle. She was in a boot and crutches for 5 weeks. Her ankle literally had all the colors of a sunset. The Orthopedist took her shoe an sock off and actually gasped.

My wife: Getting old sucks.

Me: It beats the alternative:

My wife after a few moment of reflection: Not by much.

I have to agree with you.

Actors that have been “de-aged” or simulated just don’t quite cross the uncanny valley for me. I loved Tron Legacy, but the de-aging on Jeff Bridges was just off. So those scenes with CLU and in the past just drew me out of the film.

It is a cinematic triumph. Peter Cushing himself called it his greatest role! Well, he might have said that.

Fun fact that I actually just learned today. The cast made from Mr Cushing’s face for his scene in Top Secret was used by the SFX wizards working on Rogue One to digitally recreate the actor for the movie.

Imagine that, a casting for a prosthetic made over 40 years ago was used to recreate the image of Peter Cushing so that he could appear as Grand Moff Tarkin again.

Have to admit, that rather stunned me when I read it.

Older Gen X’er here.

This list was basically a Tuesday for me back in the day.

SIR/MADAM! I call foul! Most foul!

Your list is horribly disingenuous, due to the absence of Val Kilmer’s greatest movie:

Top Secret

Accusation in a mirror