Not Exactly Five Nines

/ Blog

Unless, of course, you meant five nines of downtime. (For those of you who don’t know what this means, check Wikipedia here).

It appears our hosting server has had some issues lately, causing an abnormal number of reboots, and Dustin’s auto startup script for our stuff isn’t working anymore. Combine this with the fact that we don’t know the site is down unless we visit it ourselves (which you can tell from my posting history happens rarely at best), and you get random long outages.

We’re working on it and hopefully the site will stay up for more than five minutes in the future. Maybe.

Red Rings of Death

/ Life

So, I’ve scoffed at all the reports of Xbox 360 failures. I mean, ours has worked perfectly for over a year, surely we couldn’t be the exception? Well, it turns out, I scoffed prematurely. We, indeed, are not the exception, as we have now been graced with the red rings of death.

Due to Microsoft’s stupid DRM scheme, if we get a new Xbox, I will no longer be able to use any of the content Dustin downloaded with his account, because I have the secondary Xbox live account.

Also, since we plan to return it with the Best Buy warranty we purchased rather than waiting four to six weeks for a repair from Microsoft, we’re going to have to do something about all of our saved games. Thanks, Microsoft.

Brought to you by iPhone

/ Applefangirl

This post from the Austin airport (major flight delays) courtesy of my fancy new iPhone. I love it. The screen is absolutely amazing and I’m getting used to the keyboard. Recommended, check it out.

Please Say a Prayer for My Mom

/ Life

Through a series of unfortunate events, my mom ended up in the emergency room several weeks ago. While the doctors were doing an MRI to check for internal bleeding, they found a suspicious growth in her liver the size of a grapefruit. It turns out that it is cancer.

After several rounds of testing it was determined that the tumor in her liver was actually a secondary tumor. Several more rounds of testing found a tiny spot of cancer in her breast, but the doctor is not sure it’s the primary tumor, even though nothing else showed up.

The tumor in her liver is too big to operate on, so she is now on chemotherapy to try to shrink it. We’re hoping that the chemo treatments are successful so she doesn’t have to do radiation.

It’s a frightening eye-opener to realize that with all of our science, technology, and medical advances that something can still be “inoperable”.

Overall she is doing pretty well. Her first chemo treatment went okay and she wasn’t too sick, but she still has five more to get through. I would truly appreciate it if you would say a little prayer for her health and recovery.

My New Theme Song

/ Life

So yesterday I was sent a link to the new Weird Al music video, White and Nerdy. I’ve always been a bit indifferent to Weird Al, some of his songs are good, some not so good, but this one is awesome. Check it out and you’ll see what I mean. :)

P.S. For a true nerd, the Wikipedia article lists all kinds of cool stuff about the video.