SysAdmin1138 @sysadmin1138@octodon.social

Been fighting spam for the last couple weeks. Timezones are kicking my butt, since there is a robust community of people 6 to 8 hours behind me, and we don't yet have automation in place to catch 'em.

And they're getting the hint that if they want their spam runs to complete, they have to get done before the US wakes up. We have a fix going into prod today that we hope will spike the high-volume spammers, but we'll see.

RTFM... Glad to see more people come to the right side of that.

Gave in and watched the first Expanse episode of the season. It was everything I imagined. Such a good show.

The third draft is complete! 15kwords longer than D2, which I'm not thrilled about. But it is a better story.

Because email is terrible, I've been having a long talk at work about deliverability.

You see, we send app-notices through email. Enough that we should be using more than one IP address. But we keep landing on some blacklists.

I had to get firm yesterday and point out that we've exhausted the technical solutions, and the only way out of the hole is to improve our behavior and wait for us to be released from purgatory.

No one likes to wait. Especially with customers complaining.

The Interstate 35W bridge fell into the Mississippi in Minneapolis several years ago. The failures there were many.
* A bad design (known)
* Lots of salt used on MN roads (known)
* Inspections missed a few things (unknown)
* Incorrect understanding about how cracks move in that particular structure (unknown)
All of it failed.

There is a thing you see a lot in incident management, and customer response to it. The demand for a Root Cause Analysis and identification of a root-cause.

This is misleading.

Most systems are distributed systems these days. They're complex. Which makes for complex failures. Complex failures are interlocking failures.

Failure-Mode Analysis is a better term than RCA.

Hello, Des Moines.

Tomorrow I drive to Des Moines, Iowa. Where I'll be speaking at DevOps Days there on Friday.

There is just no getting around the fact that big data takes big time to move around.

Is something happening to witches.town? I saw a post with advice for moving away. Is it going down, or experiencing a drama event?

2606:4700:4700:0:0:0:0:1111 Is their IPv6 service, but it isn't nearly as fast from where I am.

Found out today that the 1.1.1.1 DNS service from CloudFlare actually has a TLS option. Didn't know you could do that.

Turns out you can.

Should be good for bypassing NXDOMAIN intercepts from my ISP :P

Watched the live JCS. Some impressions.

1. Actors who can act and are amazing (Judas).
2. Singers who can act are almost as good (Mary, Harod).
3. Singers who can't act in star roles are not that good (Jesus).
4. They needed another week in previews to nail the technical passes, OMG.
5. I AM HERE FOR SPARKLY GAY JUDAS, WHO CAN SING.

Of the... 4? JCSs I've watched, this Judas is likely my favorite.

What many people don't realize is that April Fools is a two-day holiday. That's what you get when you have a global holiday and the weird way we do timezones.

Same thing goes for the Transgender Day of Visibility.

Which means they overlap. TDoV needs a new day.

All this means that I'm staring at the concept of actually /dieting/ for the first time in my life, since my half-diet methods no longer seem to work now.

I don't want to pathologize food.

I don't want my body/brain to forget what 'hungry' means.

When suggesting I should eat my veggies didn't work, my parents went to coercive methods as a kid. The side-effect of that is anything with that green crunch sets off a horrible nausea attack that I have zero motivation to fix. That makes 'eating healthy' much harder.

Due to age and other things my blood-chemistry is beginning to make my doctor say those magic six words every woman hates to hear (you should lose a few pounds). It was "might want to" for a while, but I've graduated to "should". Some of it is bullshit BMI, but the things I'm high on are the kinds of things that weight sometimes helps.

I'm exercising, so some of that is muscle. But not close to all of it.

In the "not helping" category is my problems with certain foods. Like greens.

I was raised by a fat-lady who didn't want to be fat. That has a bunch of side-effects, like dad being very sensitive to the weight of his kids, me following a shame-enforced 3 meal no snacking policy most of the time growing up (it wasn't a rule, but there was judgment when it happened), and my sister having an eating disorder for a few years.

In adulthood, I'm still a 3-meal person. And I've been actively trying to avoid pathologizing my food.

That may have to change.

Spring is playing peek a boo.