Pebbles on the Beach

CASINO ROYALE 2006

My life would be so much easier if that were true. But it's not, and trying to pretend it's true is dangerous to myself and the people around me.

Dracula and Jonathan’s Tango - from The Polish National Opera production of ‘Dracula’.

The fucking neon blanket.

I can't find a picture of it but I want you to imagine hubris given physical form. This blanket, this fucking blanket was knitted by holding SEVEN strands of yarn together on size 32 needles. I knit it from the inside out and only stopped when I was out of yarn. It was massive. Too massive. It worked as a weighted blanket but it was so hard to actually pick up and move around. I never weighed it but it was just. Too much blanket. Washing it was almost impossible. I had to drag it to a Laundromat to find a washer big enough only to discover that when it was wet IT WAS TOO HEAVY TO PICK UP i literally had to drag it over to the dryers this defeating the purpose of cleaning it

Okay, my turn.

My hubby loves the 4th Doctor and as a gift, I said I would knit this for him. I sized it up, got the pattern. No gauge. Rough size 14 feet long. No needle recs.

I decided to use 5 yarn and work it row by row. If it was a bit bigger, there would be no problem.

Can you see the problem?

I worked on it. And worked. I rolled it up as I worked, pinned it to keep it clean, and worked. And worked.

And ran out of yarn.

This should have clued me in. I should have ripped the whole thing, redone the width and drop down at least 4 needle sizes to tighten this fucker up.

I bought more yarn.

The roll was 18 in diameter when I finished it. It was 20 inches wide. So hubbies and I took it down to the lawn to measure it behind our apartment building.

And unrolled it

And unrolled it.

Go back farther, sweetheart. I'm sure it's not too much bigger

Are you ready?

No. No you aren't.

It was not 14 feet long

It was not 20 feet long.

It was 43 fucking feet long.

It tried to eat my hubby.

He's 5'9".

.

.

.

Oh and one thing I learned afterwards -

the results: 

CASINO ROYALE 2006

SHIT.

some info, crowdstrike is essentially an antivirus software for enterprises. which means normal laypeople cant really get it, they're for businesses and organisations and important stuff.

so, on a friday evening (it of course wasnt friday everywhere but it was friday evening in oceania which is where it first started causing damage due to europe and na being asleep), crowdstrike pushed out an update to their windows users that caused a bug.

before i get into what the bug is, know that friday evening is the worst possible time to do this because people are going home. the weekend is starting. offices dont have people in them. this is just one of many perfectly placed failures in the rube goldburg machine of crowdstrike. there's a reason friday is called 'dont push to live friday' or more to the point 'dont fuck it up friday'

so, at 3pm at friday, an update comes rolling into crowdstrike users which is automatically implemented. this update immediately causes the computer to blue screen of death. very very bad. but it's not simply a 'you need to restart' crash, because the computer then gets stuck into a boot loop.

this is the worst possible thing because, in a boot loop state, a computer is never really able to get to a point where it can do anything. like download a fix. so there is nothing crowdstrike can do to remedy this death update anymore. it is now left to the end users.

it was pretty quickly identified what the problem was. you had to boot it in safe mode, and a very small file needed to be deleted. or you could just rename crowdstrike to something else so windows never attempts to use it.

it's a fairly easy fix in the grand scheme of things, but the issue is that it is effecting enterprises. which can have a looooot of computers. in many different locations. so an IT person would need to manually fix hundreds of computers, sometimes in whole other cities and perhaps even other countries if theyre big enough.

another fuck up crowdstrike did was they did not stagger the update, so they could catch any mistakes before they wrecked havoc. (and also how how HOW do you not catch this before deploying it. this isn't a code oopsie this is a complete failure of quality ensurance that probably permeates the whole company to not realise their update was an instant kill). they rolled it out to everyone of their clients in the world at the same time.

and this seems pretty hilarious on the surface. i was havin a good chuckle as eftpos went down in the store i was working at, chaos was definitely ensuring lmao. im in aus, and banking was literally down nationwide.

but then you start hearing about the entire country's planes being grounded because the airport's computers are bricked. and hospitals having no computers anymore. emergency call centres crashing. and you realised that, wow. crowdstrike just killed people probably. this is literally the worst thing possible for a company like this to do.

crowdstrike was kinda on the come up too, they were starting to become a big name in the tech world as a new face. but that has definitely vanished now. to fuck up at this many places, is almost extremely impressive. its hard to even think of a comparable fuckup.

here's what one of our ops guys posted in the meeting:

You can see exactly when everyone realized how badly they’d fucked up.

This is about to change the entire way the cyber world works, by the way. This is very akin to what happened to our telecommunications grid on 9/11, and the sudden amount of legislation to make sure it never happened again was absolutely insane.

I don’t say this to frighten you, because the odds are good it’s nothing that should cause fear (legislation will likely be aimed at companies providing and/or using these services, and at bolstering 911). But the world changed today. If you’re late Gen Z or early Gen Alpha, this is something that’s slipping by you so quietly you won’t even realize until years from now that you lived through a watershed. (This isn’t me being condescending when I say that, by the way. My CrowdStrike moment was the switch from analog to digital TV. Sooner or later we all have one.)

"dear my beloved girl wife,

The hours are long and strenuous, and the bathrooms needlessly gendered. I'm being hailed as a hero for my work in the trenches, but I am merely a simple soldier. They shower us with praise and iced coffee, but the line barely moves in our favor. Bit locker holds us back more than any null file.

I fear I will have to work over time as the laptops continue to pile.

Wait for your darling my love