Flying Gogoplata

I’d like to make one thing clear: I am very happy the OCF exists, if for no other reason than that I use the model of the OCF as a proof of concept for a functional, student-run computing service network whenever I pitch similar ideas to the USCA. It’s an organization run entirely on volunteers and donations, providing a service completely free of charge for which they could easily charge, and continue to support users who have long since graduated.

What seems to be amazing to so many people is that the organization is student-run. I have a lot of trouble understanding exactly why that is. None of the physical resources they have are particularly inaccessible to them because they are college students, and the environment here seems to be conducive to the particular pool of human resources the OCF requires. For some reason, however, there seems to be a mistrust of empowering and employing in positions with real responsibility where it can be avoided, particularly in the USCA. I have consistently argued that the OCF is proof that there is no inherent danger in entrusting responsibility to students, and the result of that empowerment is typically far more accessible to the locality than anything a big company provides.

For me, this does not excuse a lack of professionalism in procedure. As I understand it, I have made a few folks at the OCF a bit unhappy for saying so. But even though you have no paying customers, it undermines your credibility if things go wrong and they don’t get fixed in a transparent manner. I am happy with all the changes the OCF has made to correct this, but I still believe my criticisms (not my rants, mind you) warranted merit. Particularly because I had entrusted my coursework to the reliability of the OCF. At this point in my experience, I couldn’t be happier that I stayed with them. They addressed all my needs/complaints directly. I look forward to continue using them as the case study for functional student operations.

This is an announcement I’m not very happy to make but I’m very thankful to be able to make. The OCF has scheduled downtime for this Friday at 10 PM until this Sunday at 10 PM for a disk array migration. Yes folks, I said “scheduled”! What this means for you, mainly, is that you won’t be able to access my blog that weekend and, naturally, that I won’t be posting to it. If you really, REEELY want to read my previous posts, they’re fed into my facebook notes. Those of you who are already my friend will be able to read my entire blog history there. If you’re not my friend, just run a search for my name and you can add me. You can also add my leg if it shows up in the search. It’s a pretty cool leg if I do say so myself. As for posts, If I really feel the urge, I will publish new posts to my facebook notes first, then migrate them to my WordPress blog when the OCF comes back up. I find that situation to be highly unlikely to occur. As you may have noticed, I’m horrible at writing over the weekend.

There have been some odd occurrences in my life at a time which I would have otherwise considered to have a dull dip in pace.

It seems as if my best friend and my blog workshop cohorts are not the only ones who read my blog. I recently received an emailed response to my ranting posts regarding the OCF downtime from the Secretary of the OCF. I hope to respond to this email soon as I’d like to be able to clarify some of my sentiments as well as address some of the recent updates, but I am very glad my writing managed to find its way to its secondarily intended audience.

For those of you who enjoyed my invitation letter, something happened to day that I don’t think has ever happened before. Not only did two different groups of Kappa sisters wave hello to me through the dining room window, they initiated the wave without my prompting! Now at this point I have no idea if they had gotten a hold of my blog post from this website, from my facebook notes (which import this blog), whether Brenna (their President) told them about me, whether Sam (our social manager) told them about me, or whether they just felt inspired to be neighborly of their own good spirits. But also at this point, I really don’t care. Thank you Kappas! You have reinvigorated my belief in the spirit of neighborhood!

Last (but of course, not least) I finally solved Rubik’s Cube! I did so on a total fluke, sliding faces without keeping track of the moves just to experiment with how pieces changed position based on the concepts we’ve been learning in the class. And all of a sudden all the faces were solved! It’s not anything I think I can repeat in practice at the moment, but I sort of get conceptually why it ended up that way. I think I have officially received my Nerd Badge for completing Rubik’s Cube.

The weather has cooled to a comfortable temperature, but I don’t think I’ll follow through on my promises just yet. I also don’t think I can hang out on the balcony in short sleeves too much longer…

Good Night!

Sometimes I frighten myself with the drastic level of violence I can imagine.

If the OCF website goes down again in the next week I may have to seriously consider committing myself to an institution.

I think I’m going to avoid the urge to bias you on my piece. The open letter below is my submission for critique. Please do with it what you will.

My blog, if you couldn’t tell, is up and running again. Hopefully it will stay that way. It may, however, move in the near future if I can find some free webspace.

As a result of my laziness, my 2.1.1 upgrade has been delayed, though I must say I am lucky for the delay. 2.1.1 was declared dangerous because some hacker got access to the download and injected his own nasty code. Since they weren’t able to determine which downloads were affected, the entire milestone has been deemed corrupted. Ouch. Let’s not let this happen again, WordPress.

As a result of the OCF downtime, I haven’t upgraded to 2.1.2 nor experimented with Akismet. Hopefully I’ll be able to play with them this weekend and report back on the results.

I think that’s it. Hopefully if I keep up with this three posts a day thing, I can catch up for my blogging slackerhood.

GAH! If I had words to explain my complete, boiling anger with the OCF for going down for an ENTIRE FUCKING WEEKEND with inadequate warning, I’m sure Google’s strict search filter would drop this post from its results. It is absolutely maddening and would be entirely unacceptable if it wasn’t fucking free. At this point I’m almost considering paying for webspace so if I don’t have reliable service at the very least I’ll have a bitching channel and financial impact on the host.

At first it was like, hey, hard drive arrays fail sometimes. Shit happens. But a hard drive array failure is starkly different from “hey, our webserver crashes twice a week and needs a hard reboot to run” or “hey, we’re just going to wipe the OS clean and start from scratch without telling anybody until several days into the process.” It’s all too frequent and always without warning. What the fuck, OCF?

My friend David puts it well: “I was much happier with the OCF service last semester. Now, 3 out of 4 times I’m there, the printers don’t work. At first I was like, ‘these guys are arrogant bastards, but that’s cool. They can be BOFHs so long as everything works.’ Except now they’re arrogant bastards and nothing works.”

I have this blindly stubborn DIY philosophy when it comes to technology that keeps me from edging anywhere near Blogger/Blogspot. This leaves me with a very strong urge to look really hard for free space that includes a PHP and MySQL installation. I feel like this search will be long and futile.

I was planning on having a piece ready for evaluation by Friday, but I had no way to post. I’ll have something up to rip apart tonight.

For those of you who noticed, the downside is reliability. OCF was down earlier today for no good reason I can think of. I’m still awaiting a MOTD from the OCF sysadmins with news of the outage. It was likely that it was unannounced scheduled maintenance or something, but after the whole disk array failure fiasco I must admit I’m a little shaken at every “Server Not Found” error I get when accessing my blog. I’ve gotten one comment on my last post ( thanks! ) but I apologize if the OCF managed to lose any comments you may have intended to write due to being entirely unavailable.

Meh, I suppose you can’t complain too much if you’re getting free webspace, free MySQL and Postgres databases, free shell access…