Author: Erik Williams

This author has written 571 articles
From the “Shipping Estimates Predicted By An Ouija Board!” Dept:
Harrowing Tales of Customer Service

From the “Shipping Estimates Predicted By An Ouija Board!” Dept:

It's that time of the year where Amazon's shipping estimates range from the surprisingly accurate to the outright fanciful and everything in between. To be fair, I've generally had reasonably good luck with the vast majority of my Amazon Prime orders arriving when they're scheduled if not a little earlier. And most of the time, a delay in shipping or arrival really isn't the end of the world. But every now and then the shipping…

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27 Nov 2023
From the “The Reshuffle That Surprises Absolutely No One!” Dept:
Doing the News

From the “The Reshuffle That Surprises Absolutely No One!” Dept:

Over the past week, it had become increasingly clear that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was going to do what pretty much every minister in Whitehall fears and is one of the main reason to actually be Prime Minister: the cabinet reshuffle. This political game of musical chairs is often instigated by the Cabinet Secretary (a career civil servant and generally the Head of the Home Civil Service which makes them arguably the most powerful person…

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14 Nov 2023
From the “Thank You To All Who Serve!” Dept:
Doing the News

From the “Thank You To All Who Serve!” Dept:

I've been thinking long and hard all day about what I wanted to write about for Veteran's Day. As I was running a couple of backups after the hard drive recovery operations earlier this week, I happened to stumble upon this picture that came from a set of slides that my father had taken whilst he was serving in his first of two deployments to Vietnam in 1967. Local man (VC?) Works for himself during…

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11 Nov 2023
From the “It’s How We Always Did RAID!” Dept:
Revenge of the Nerds!

From the “It’s How We Always Did RAID!” Dept:

One of my mates from a former job when I actually did technical things for a living read this confessional article "The RAID Tower Is Making Beeps I Really Don't Want To Hear" and mentioned his backup scheme is RAID 0 backed up to another RAID 0. For what he's using his storage for, it makes perfect sense to me and there is no *ONE RIGHT WAY* that works for everyone. :) For the non-nerds…

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09 Nov 2023
From the “I Like WordPress Categories” Dept:
Updates

From the “I Like WordPress Categories” Dept:

After writing about a somewhat harrowing bit of excitement when one of the RAID arrays decided to throw a drive, I reckoned that it was time to add another category for posts of a nerdy technical nature rather than clogging up "Doing the News!": Revenge of the Nerds! This is where you can read the stories about the behind-the-scenes technology that permeates just about everything I do (after all, I *WAS* an IT weenie/database geek…

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09 Nov 2023
From the “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together!” Dept:
Revenge of the Nerds!

From the “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together!” Dept:

After yesterday's harrowing episode of "The RAID Tower Is Making Beeps I Really Don't Want To Hear", we finally got to the point of the recovery where it was time to swap out the old 4TB hard drive (new paperweight!) that had failed with one that was presumably more interested in being a valuable team member in a RAID 5 array. There was a slightly scary moment at the start when the RAID controller was…

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09 Nov 2023
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