The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Some things we learned today

  1. Do not take Parker for a car ride right after dinner. Or, at the very least, don't let him sit in the front seat if you do. You'll just have to feed him again when you get home, and find the Fabreeze.
  2. If you leave the bedroom while Parker is sleeping on the bed and go to Wild Oats, he won't notice you've left until you return. If you leave while he's holding a ropie toy and looking at you with (literal) puppy-dog eyes, the entire neighborhood will notice you've left immediately.
  3. No shoe is safe, on or off a foot.
  4. A large grasshopper (2" long) that hops when a puppy's nose makes contact provides thrilling entertainment—for about four seconds. Then there's a crunch, a buzzing sound, another crunch, and the next day you get to see the grasshopper again.

Why servers sometimes crash

I just found out about a server crash at a friend's old company. It seems one of the staff members sent a 2.7 MB graphical file (wrapped in a PDF, wrapped in a MIME email) to 900 people. For some reason, that crashed the Exchange server creating 8.5 GB of transaction logs in just under 20 hours, which overflowed the system drive, which caused the entire server to collapse. At last report, a consultant had cleaned out the transaction logs and most of the message queues, but Exchange was still re-trying some of the addresses.

This problem was, therefore, between chair and keyboard. Whose chair and whose keyboard is difficult to tell.

Veritas Airlines

This weeks Economist has a terrific parody of pre-flight announcements:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are delighted to welcome you aboard Veritas Airways, the airline that tells it like it is. Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust.

The kid has a career all laid out for him

Parker and I stopped by my grandmother's place today, and he was a big hit with all the residents. He met about fifty people, let everyone pat him, didn't get crazy (he is only 12 weeks old, so this is huge), and was the sweetest little dog he could be. More than one of the staff suggested he'd make a good therapy dog when he gets older.

But after this morning, he's one pooped pup:

Pilot locked out after bathroom break

Forget the comedy, this has security implications:

An Air Canada pilot who left the flight deck to visit the washroom found himself locked out of the cockpit when he tried to return—forcing the crew to remove the door from its hinges.
For approximately 10 minutes, passengers described seeing the pilot bang on the door and communicating with the cockpit through an internal telephone, but being unable to open the cabin door. Eventually, the crew forced the door open by taking the door off its hinges completely...

Gosh, that's nice to know. Comforting.

I suppose if the pilots noticed someone trying to take the door off the hinges, they could take corrective action easily, like inverting the plane or diving (which pretty much stops all movement in the cabin). But still, that seems like a little security issue, doesn't it? Sort of like having a debug mode on a login prompt?

Only 64 days until Christmas?

As little Parker (Cutest. Puppy. Ever.) alternates between chewing his rawhide stick, a vegan snack my mom found, my laptop power cord, and my toes, I'm loading up on carbs for today's ride and reading the news. The Washington Post had a heartwarming story that made me almost as happy as Parker's second accident-free night with us:

Facing the most difficult political environment since they took control of Congress in 1994, Republicans begin the final two months of the midterm campaign in growing danger of losing the House while fighting to preserve at best a slim majority in the Senate, according to strategists and officials in both parties.
Over the summer, the political battlefield has expanded well beyond the roughly 20 GOP House seats originally thought to be vulnerable. Now some Republicans concede there may be almost twice as many districts from which Democrats could wrest the 15 additional seats they need to take control.

If you're at all unhappy with the war, the imminent collapse of the housing market, the enormous differences between how the rich are getting richer while everyone else isn't, or how the government is listening to your phone calls, and you happen to live in a Republican district, you can do something to change it when polls open in 64 days and 15 hours.