For a long while one of my servers “crashed” weekly. Every saturday at 3am the load would just spiral up and everything would become unresponsive (still working but slow) – everything was waiting on disk I/O. I kept putting off checking why this happened, and just rebooted the machine manually every saturday (lazy lazy). After a while I found out it was at 3am, so it had to be a cron job. I then noticed that one of my other servers also had a high load at 3am, but less high and it recovered.

Today I did some thinking and checking, and to blame was.. me! I had configured smartmontools to do a weekly long selfcheck at 3am on all 4 disks in the software RAID5 at the same time. This apparently took so much speed away from the disks that the machine didn’t cope.. Woopsie.

Note: hobby environment of course, real production I would have spent more time figuring it out 🙂

ISPam, notorious spelling- and grammar fail site, complains about wrong translations on a .nl site of a French hosting company. As someone so eloquently put it: "pot, kettle, #000000" … :rolleyes:

When you find this in your mailbox:

Doh.

Last weekend I went to Antwerp to shop for clothes, followed by a visit to the world’s best frituur, N°1 in Antwerp city. It’s been years since I was there, seems they’d expanded and the fries were still as good 😉

However, after that I found it was time for some gas, so I entered the nearest Shell station in my TomTom. Alas, after driving for a bit, and circling the place where this Shell station was supposed to be, decided this was a wrong POI entry. Selected the next closest Shell, drove there, NO Shell. Getting a bit pissed off I stopped at a Total we passed and fueled up. (however I prefer V-Power above Excellium 98).

This was not the first time TomTom let me down, earlier I was driving through the Netherlands and craved for a Whopper… I had to try 4 times to find a Burger King, but all POI’s turned out to be fake, there were no BK’s around there anywhere.

What value do these things have?

Is there some sort of award for this? Yesterday at the store the woman scanned as if her life depended on it, I was just waiting for her to throw a glass jar on the floor (as she was scanning faster than I was prepared to put the stuff back into the shopping cart). I usually try to keep up or even be faster which usually works, but if it’s so hopeless and customer-unfriendly I just slow down to grandma-speed. Pity nothing broke as I would have enjoyed to go and get another one at grandma-speed (10min would not be enough) and in case of trouble getting the manager involved.

I guess "orders" are to do this as fast as possible for better turnaround but when you’re just shoving/throwing things back into the customer’s cart I think it’s time for vacation.

Methinks eBay got their seasons a bit messed up – unless your definition of "close" varies from mine, spring isn’t really "close". or is it? Maybe I’m just mistaken… 😮

Option a: Play Pirates on Facebook for an hour.

Option b: Make an appointment to go and see a house, drive 20 min over there, wait for 20 min for someone to show up, drive back for another 20 minutes.

I’d rather waste time with option a, alas, option b was todays fun trip.

A few days I noticed KBC Online had a bug which did not allow to pay non-integer amounts (it always floor()’d it to ,00) inside the EU. I sent them an email about it and received the following:

KBC Bank & Verzekering kan enkel een optimale, veilige werking garanderen ls uw computer voldoet aan de systeemvereisten zoals vermeld op haar website.U kunt deze systeemvereisten nakijken op ‘www.kbc.be/systeemvereisten‘. Mozilla Firefox echter wordt niet ondersteund. We kunnen u dan ook aanraden Internet Explorer te gebruiken.

The bug has since been fixed anyway, but ehmm… *sigh*

As predicted, Telenet invoiced us wrongly, 10 euro ex vat too much, even though we have a limit of 65GB/month and I used 65, they invoiced 4.6GB for 10 euro total (wtf @ price per gig, anyway). Called them, and it will be credited. This’ll be interesting to see if that really happens, else i just stop paying… :rolleyes:

On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

Umm, yeah…