Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

1. My son enjoys playing Roblox, so when that game went down hard for a couple of days around Halloween, I knew about it. The company would eventually publish a surprisingly enjoyable post-mortem of the outage, which included the following:

We enjoyed seeing some of our most dedicated players figure out our DNS steering scheme and start exchanging this information on Twitter so that they could get "early" access as we brought the service back up. [bold added]

My son's only eight, but this sounds like something he'd do if he were older.

2. On the opposite end of the computing accountability, transparency, and competence scale, we have the following example of the "jankiest piece of tech" you've seen an enterprise depend on, courtesy of a state government agency:

In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with [its] little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They traced it back to the shared IBM mainframe, and then to an RPC service, and finally back to the AST PC that had been generating the unique license numbers on the HP Non-Stop and sending them to the IBM.

To prevent such an outage from occurring again, a yellow sticky saying "don't turn off" was attached to the AST.

Underneath this is a similar bit regarding the entire internet, albeit in its earliest days. [Editor's Note: This is a rabbit hole. You have been warned.]

3. In America, no matter how little you may know about baseball, you have probably heard of the Curse of the Bambino. I'm hardly superstitious, but I love the Japanese counterpart. They have the Curse of the Colonel:

Kāneru Sandāsu no Noroi) refers to a 1985 Japanese urban legend regarding a reputed curse placed on the Japanese Kansai-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team by the ghost of deceased KFC founder and mascot Colonel Sanders.

The curse was said to be placed on the team because of the Colonel's anger over treatment of one of his store-front statues, which was thrown into the Dōtonbori River by celebrating Hanshin fans before their team's victory in the 1985 Japan Championship Series. As is common with sports-related curses, the Curse of the Colonel was used to explain the team's subsequent 18-year losing streak. [notes and links removed]

And yes, long-time readers here might recall that the Colonel doubles as a sort of Father Christmas there, too.

4. And finally, while we're revisiting trivia related to restaurant chains: Did you know that Waffle House has an official poet laureate? She promotes higher education on behalf of her company in rural Georgia:

Image by Simon Daoudi, via Unsplash, license.

I told [CEO and fellow Georgia tech alumnus] Bert [Ehmer I wanted to go out to the most rural schools in the most far-flung counties and talk about arts and poetry. I wanted the students to hear my story about going to college. Bert suggested I write up a proposal for the foundation. I asked for a modest grant to cover travel to 12 schools and a poetry competition, which would pay the winner's tuition to the state's online college core program. They agreed to fund my idea and mailed me a Waffle House nametag with an official title, Waffle House Poet Laureate. The idea of it has just sort of caught on.

In addition to recognizing the value of an educated work force, Waffle House takes being open 24/7 so seriously that FEMA uses whether its stores are open as a measure of hurricane severity after one hits.

-- CAV