International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day. In recognition of this day, there has been a call for a general woman’s strike. I thought long and hard about how I would participate in this event. Even yesterday I had no clear view of whether or not I would be working today.
As a self-employed woman, me not working today only hurts me and my clients. There’s no one to leave work for, I either do it before or after. It’s got to get done and it’s my responsibility to do it. But at the same time, I recognize the unpaid and underpaid work most women do and fully support the strike.
After much thought, I decided that my contribution to the strike would be to do what I needed to do for work. But that I would remove myself from public conversations about email today. I spend quite a bit of my time doing unpaid work that supports the email industry: standards work, answering questions in various fora, supporting different initiatives, writing documents, blogging about industry events. I won’t be doing any of that work today.
Yes, there are questions I could answer, advice I could give, industry events that I have comments and insight on. But today, today I’m not going to do any of that.

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What a week!

Yesterday, after 5pm, I was so happy. I was telling folks to have a great weekend. To take time off and relax. Have fun! Don’t work! Enjoy the weather!
Then someone pointed out it was only Thursday.
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But! I got up this morning and got lots of happy Facebook notifications from friends about how TODAY was Friday. I was ready to have an awesome and productive day and go into the weekend with a clean todo list and a well planned next week.
Then I broke my mail client. Trying to add an attachment would crash everything. That got fixed that somewhere around noon.
So! I’ll just grab some lunch and get ready for a productive afternoon!
Then I broke finder.
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Yes, that is a picture of my 27 inch monitor with hundreds of Windows opening. I was trying to delete some of the 39,000 .jpgs from my mail client. My finger slipped on the trackpad, though, and instead of “move to trash” I clicked “show in containing folder.” Ooops. I finally crashed finder manually and it restarted and didn’t try and reopen all the windows.
OK. Fine. I’ll go to the bank and pick up mail and drop off tax (ugh, ow) payments.
On the way there, construction screwed up traffic and it took me more than 20 minutes to go 2 miles. (It’s not a safe place to walk, or I would have). On the way back, I went the Other Way. Only to discover a firetruck across 4 lanes of traffic and half a dozen cop cars showing up to a very recent accident.
Then, while writing this blog post I managed to somehow move widgets around and lose them on the wordpress editor.
Apparently I should have taken my friend’s advice and just decided today was not a work day. Because, wow, was it a mess. What all this means is I’m not going to try and blog anything substantial. I’d probably make some total boneheaded mistake and that wouldn’t be any good.
Instead, I will share the song KFOG played every Friday at 5pm (before Cumulus decided to fire everyone). Because I am really in the need of this week to be over.
Have a good weekend. Next week will be better!

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Network glitches and corrupted VMs

I had a bit of a interesting Friday. I was so glad it was finally the weekend. Saturday we did a bunch of errands, including go visit our servers. See, we’ve been upgrading infrastructure to implement a second type of backup system. Saturday we were doing the last set of upgrades so we could install over the weekend.
Yes, we do all our own networking and racking.
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Saturday evening Steve is installing the new backup software. This is awesome backup software. It backs up the entire virtual machine. If we lose a virtual machine, we can just reload the entire thing and it will be back again.
Except while installing the software, there is a weird network glitch. Said network glitch caused the system to crash. The system crashes hard. The system crash corrupts some of the data on disk. The data on disk is our virtual machine files. Files are in read only mode and won’t fsck automatically.
We lose most of our production virtual machines.  We’re off the air.
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Possibly this was tragic, not ironic. I dunno, it’s been a long weekend.
We lost a bunch of production virtual machines to the disc corruption. We haven’t lost any data, but it’s taking some time to rebuild the machines and pull data from the other backup system and get it installed.
That means some of our websites and services, like tools.wordtothewise.com are down. It may mean you saw some bounces if you sent us mail over the weekend. Mail is back and we are communicating with the outside world again.
Steve’s working through our other services as fast as possible to get them back up and running.
(If massive server issues weren’t enough, one of the cats got a UTI so we’re having to pill her twice a day. Then last night managed to puke so hard she passed out briefly. Poor thing. She’s doing better this morning.)

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Phone call of the week

I phoneforblogreceived a message on our 800 number. “This is Mark from a-website.example. Your customers are complaining to me that they are not getting my mail. And you’re blocking mail from me. Explain this to me!”
 
 
I called him back and left a message: “I think you’re confused and I probably can’t help you.”
A few minutes later, Mark returns my call.
L: Hi, this is laura.
M: Who are you? You called me, you must be from Clearwire!
L: No, I’m not with Clearwire, I’m with WttW.
M: Then why is your phone number on the Clearwire website?
L: I don’t know, but this isn’t Clearwire. The Clearwire website is redirecting to Sprint. They got bought out a while ago.
M: Redirecting to Sprint? What does that mean? Your phone number is on Clearwire’s website. You must be with Clearwire.
L: No, really, I’m not.
M: Why is your phone number on their website?
L: I don’t know. But this is not Clearwire. (I start searching the blog because I remember some post somewhere about Clearwire.)
M: Well, who are you?
L: I run a delivery consulting firm. Is it possible you found my website and the blog post that says all clearwire.net addresses are being discontinued April 15, 2015?
M: They’re gone?
L: Yes, for more than a year now.
M: Oh.
scene
That blog post is the #1 google hit if you search for clearwire.net.
 

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