Embedded: Twitter puts outage
Hide and seek. Did I scare you?
Earlier this week, Twitter went down. It went down hard. It was scary. I know because I was there. I now officially have the PTSD. At last, I’m finally somebody.
The duration of the outage was about 45 minutes. That’s approximately twice the amount of time Apollo 13 spent out of radio contact when it was behind the moon. I just got a double dose of what it must have felt like to be in Mission Control. And I’m a non-smoker!
It was the longest outage since Twitter’s IPO and the second crash in the last nine days.
The outage was described in the strongest possible terms as the “longest outage since the IPO.” What those two things have to do with each other I have absolutely no idea.
Some in the media took the opportunity to write quippish jokes about the mayhem. (Hint: It was too soon.) Jokes, I must say, that practically wrote themselves.
- “Twitter Suffers Outage During Biz Stone’s Panel at SXSW” – I don’t know what a “Biz Stone” is but I bet it was pissed. Source: WSJ.
- “Twitter Outage Takes Site Down for 45 Minutes, Users Stranded” – I bet a lot of them were forced to hitchhike. Source: Newsmax.com.
- “Twitter goes down, chaos and productivity ensue” – What the fuck are you implying? Source: Washington Post.
- “‘We Experienced Unexpected Complications’: The Language Of Twitter Outages” – Hey, that’s the hip new lingo. Source: Lifehacker Australia.
- “Twitter Goes Down: Something is Technically Wrong” – You have a firm grasp of the obvious. Souce: The Next Web.
- “Twitter Briefly Goes Down, Silencing Millions Of Horrible, Unnecessary Twitter Jokes” – That hurts, that really hurts. Source: Huffington Post.
Again, as your intrepid embedded reporter, I was there on the front lines. What follows are my eyewitness firsthand accounts of the action as it unfolded.
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Tales of the Moved
And now a few exciting storyoids from the Mover’s Notebook…
The greater the change, the greater the likelihood it will stab directly into your heart like a stiletto and abscond with your life.
–Tom B. Taker
As some of you may already know, my wife and I recently made a big move. Excepting a trip to Mars (where I’m currently on file as a one-way volunteer) it ranks as pretty substantial as far as moves go. We went from the quiet rural lifestyle of a tiny goat farm in the Himalayas and a village of 42 souls to one of the most urbane existences possible in the heart of a big city: Portland, Oregon.
What follows are a few of our observations and experiences.
Free Parking
I hate people who think they are above the law. How rude! Such bad form! Like people who park in the fire lane to use the ATM rather than walking the 20 feet from a legitimate parking space. Or people who say they made charitable donations on their tax returns when they really didn’t. I loathe and despise that sort of thing.
People who park on the wrong side of the street also make that list.
Yet here, in Portland, there’s so much of it that it’s hard to imagine that it’s actually illegal. In fact, it almost seems like parking on the wrong side of the street is the norm and parking legally is the aberration. It’s that prevalent.
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Up Side On Side Down Sideways
Tiny Solo Cup. (Great song, too.)
Factoid: In 2010 Americans expended 250 million tons of trash. 93.2 percent consisted of the Solo 2 oz Plastic Souffle Cup.
I often wonder what it would be like to explain certain aspects of my existence to an isolated indigenous person who was totally unaware of the modern world. I have the feeling that even mundane things like money, banks, interest rates, and mortgage-backed securities with post-load risk factors (fully assumable) would be hard to communicate with hand gestures. (Aside from the obvious one, I mean. I have a feeling they could pick that one up pretty quick.)
“You see, Ndugu, this is what we call a storage unit.”
“Meester Tom, what is this place? It is quite strange. I feel we should not be here.”
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Shouts from the Abyss 
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