You can always rely on the Ancient Ones to cock things up

Cars and computers have that inherent ability to fail at the very moment you discuss replacing them in my experience. Or once, when I was doing an SBS 2003 to 2011 migration, the RAID controller on the old server died during the one reboot I had to do to get the server in migration mode.

Hey so I've been sitting on this hot IoT 0-day for weeks, when I lucked out. Some luser plugged in his new smart washing machine, and I was able to gain full access right away. And I mean full access, pumps, motors, everything.

If that wasn't bad enough, he was using the same brand smart fridge, and even bulbs! I flickered those suckers to mess with him.

If only the guy had had IoT cameras. Would love to have seen his dumb face.

Reference to Thoth coupled with a previous reference to Aleister Crowley

Dabbsy, are you a rosicrucian? Is it possible that your dabbling in occultism is opening a channel for the Old Gods? You've only yourself to blame. Now concerned that I might take hits to sanity from repeated exposure to your columns.

Artificial Intelligence is Difficult

Artificial Intelligence is difficult ... but Artificial Bloody Mindedness has been perfected and is in action every day.

Simples.

The roots were already there. However, the new evacuation pump was more powerful than the old evacuation pump.

Suggestion: Ask Half-Life to turn off and/or unplug appliances that are misbehaving.

The machines are not actually doing it on purpose ... they don't have anything resembling cognitive processes. Rather, the human(s) at the controls haven't thought the scenario through.

Well, some will definitely attribute concerted breakdowns to the Ancient Ones or maybe proto-Skynet - the others may have heard of the clumpiness of chance... :)

You gotta watch

for the full moon on the second Friday of the month, especially if it's the thirteenth. On those days not only will the sky fall in but your PSU will fritz and proceed to fry everything on the +5 and +12V rail. A true confluence of shitstorms.

Roots

Nothing to do with Kunta Kinte. 3 days after moving into our new house our sewer backed up. It seems the previous occupant had lived there for 20 years on their own. We moved in as a household of 4 adults and the maple roots in the sewer pipes obstructed more crap in those three days than they had probably ever seen. Cost about $1000 to get the pipe replaced and the offending maple removed. Took weeks to lose the stench in the basement.

Music

While we're on the subject of theme tunes to television programmes....

Why don't TV programmes have theme tunes any more? Or films for that matter.

The Champions, Minder, Starsky and Hutch et al all had recognisable tunes.

Now, try and recall the theme music for, say, Lost. Battlestar Galactica? Heros? Fringe?

Or is it that the kind of TV I watch just doesn't deserve a memorable tune?

A long time ago ...

"Two weeks later, an update to the system was rolled out and the UAT process recommenced. Shortly after, I stumbled across the following pop-up information message window:

Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent.

How the hell did that get back in there? I logged the typo again, which as before was traced to a language file and nixed."

Many moons ago, we were the biggest corporate customer of a mail appliance vendor. Good products they were, with occasional bugs (who doesn't have any ?).

For a solid 5 years, EVERY, I mean, like in every single one of them, updates, would revert all patches they'd send us. They simply were running an OS branch for us, and every stock release would never contain them. Every time, we had to log new issues. Of course, they never told us and always acted as surprised.

And of course, those were real bugs, not tantrum changes requests. I suppose other customers wouldn't see the bugs as they were not corporate.

And you thought "Log in as root" was just a metaphor?

Tech can bite you in unusual ways

I know someone who worked for a small delivery company in the early 80s, they were contracted to urgently deliver some "stuff" by the MOD in April-June 1982.

He had delivered what turned out to be a new control rack for a radar system to a RAF base, got the signature for proof of delivery and let the forklift driver get on their job to unload.

The driver must have been new to the job, as they swung around with the load elevated and neatly dropped it from about a meter onto concrete.

It rattled when they picked it up.

Of course tech is sentient

When was the last time your smoke alarm had a low battery beep at 3 p.m. on a nice warm Saturday afternoon? NEVER. It is always at 2 a.m. on a work night in winter.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Bah!

The anti-handiman demons. They hover over a home improvement or repair job in swarms, waiting for just the right comedic moment to infest the equipment and, for actual example, make the chain on a chainsaw come off the bar at maximum wellie even though it was in perfect adjustment and had plenty of oil. Anti-handiman demons are what cause everyone on the planet to sever the cord of their own hedge trimmer (which has driven everyone to replace corded tools with battery-powered equivalents, allowing the prospect of a simple recharge burning down one's house).

I known them well. Google The Occasional Stevie and feel my pain.

Washing machine anecdote

We once hired a holiday cottage and it had a washing machine by the sink. I rarely use a washing machine on holiday, but on this occasion we thought we'd stick some towels in.

On opening the door, I amost fainted from the 'Breath of Satan' that hit me as an entire washing-machine's worth of foetid brown water poured over my feet and into the room.

Some plumber from mars had managed to join up the sink plughole and the washing machine exit pipe in such a way that when you emptied the sink, quite a bit of that water would leak into the drum. After a few weeks of guests using the sink but not using the machine, the build-up had developed into a powerful and voluminous brew.

I suspect that new forms of disease evolved during their time in the drum and now that they are released into the wild, it is only a matter of time before we all die! (Well I suppose that's true anyway...)

Lap of the God

I am a kindly God. One that has your best interests at heart. If left in the hands of my evil twin, Devious Maximus, then all those little irritating mishaps would never have come about, and you would now be happily entrusting your entire existence to your "infallible" technology, and thus be on the cusp of extinction.

No. It is good that I regularly remind you of how fickle your technology can be, and how misguided your trust in what you know. After all, you have only recently grasped the concept of electricity and have yet to experience the Universal Charge Cycle, where electrons and protons reverse their charge every thousand years.

Oh and there's more, lots more, that you have little concept of, so, yes, in the interests of keeping my long running experiment alive, I will from time to time keep butting in and right royally screwing with your gizmos.

Oh and your subscription fees for Sol are overdue. Late payment fees of ten virgin sacrifices will be applied to your account if full remittance is not forthcoming. All major blood types accepted.

It's all connected

You are connected with all of the objects in your life via an underlying realm not perceptible to humans, even knowing about it can damage your sanity so it has to be approached in the same way as the Game, damn. As noticing linked failures can lead to considering the possibility of this underlying medium, this is becoming a serious public health risk as before the internet it was just one of those things and never widely discussed so rarely a problem.

Fortunately those in the know, that are still sufficiently sane, have come up with a solution. It is called the Internet of Things, going forward all objects in your life will indeed be connected in an equally inexplicable, but easily blameworthy way, therefore any failure clusters can be atributed to this technology.

I just need to go and lie down in a dark, no not the dark, blibble...

Apostrophes....

It's a funny quirk the possessive apostrophe, if we knew it was Bob then it would be right to say:

"Please ensure the child element is linked to Bob’s parent."

To avoid confusion where you have many Bobs:

"Please ensure the child element is linked to it’s parent."

So arguably the possessive on "it" is not only acceptable, but would really make a better rule.

(Of course I regularly do this just to wind people up).

Portals to the Gods

Computers are portals to the realm of the gods. Some gods are good and send you unrequested photos of laughing babies. Some others, well, not so much. They can do much worse than bad punctuation.

Do you REALLY want a portal to the gods inside your car? That water feature could have come directly from a radiator at 100C while you're tooling down the highway above the speed limit. Of course such a disaster would then stick the accelerator to the floor and disable the brakes at the same time. Some lessons from the gods are tough.

If you smell smoke...

The fire is out...

This is a famous saying in my family, as my nephew first upper this phrase to my older sister when he accidentally "fired up" a telephone book late at night. My incident was when I (again late at night) heard the (grumble) smoke detector outside my home office start bleeping. Since the battery had not been changed recently, I (stopped me) assumed that that might be the problem and got up to start sharing at the nasty device. Then upon further reflection, and exercising my "acute" sense of smell, I detected an odor of SOMETHING BURNING, and proceeded to walk towards the ever so stronger smell. Yes, my nice wonderful wife had put some dishtowels on the top of the gas fireplace in an adjacent room, and THEY WERE ON FIRE. Thankfully the wall behind and above the fireplace was nicely tiled with an wonderful ceramic pattern, and a quick application of DHMO solved the problem.

As for wastewater backups, just be careful about the lowest toilet in the house. When the sewer lateral line (from the house to the street) gets clogged, it is the place that has the largest opening. In my case a couple of showers and flushes worth. After a call to the drain guy and his expending the entire 75 feet of snake, the problem was resolved. It turned out to be a sewer rat that assisted in clogging up the pipe. It was an interesting cleanup. Thankfully the half bath containing the toilet in question had a direct door to the outside that in combination with a garden hose assisted in the cleanup. It was an adventure!

Went into work one fine morning.

Boss, "The server rooms flooded."

Me "We're on the 34th floor! How the &^%^&*(&%$£ could it get flooded?"

I looked into the server room, and sure enough water was dripping from the ceiling.

Tech has timing.

How many times have you had a problem and as soon as someone else comes across to see, they work perfectly?

So, a couple of months into a bureau refit in Paris

We arrive one Monday morning to discover the place three inches deep in that which is normally all over the Parisian streets when the dogs have been by... Turns out a cast iron pipe had a right angle bend before running across our hung ceiling, and sometime over the weekend, the pipe had cracked and the poo had failed to make the bend.

The icing on the cake, so to speak, was the discovery, during rectification of the issue, of a couple of square feet of asbestos sheeting - which required another fifty or sixty thousand quid to dispose of in the approved manner.

Less than 24 hours later, we decided to try it out with a full wash – at which point the new washing machine, with all its BLINKEN LICHTEN and computerised controls,

trouble at t'mill one of the arm flay rods has gone out of sken on't treadle!

For the IT angle

Real world version of 'dead zombie children in the pipe'.

And, they are chanting; drains, drains. . .

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions

To add a counter-argument, my general experience is that, yes, trouble is never a single, logical point,but in general there is a single, logical narrative.

Recently, a customer (health service) was infected with one of the encryption scams. No irreparable harm was done, but it did throw up a few security issues they needed to address, and it caused our application a minor wobble, but that was it.

Jump forward a month, and a letter generator suddenly starts crawling and then we start getting reports that saved letters (files) are missing. The entries/links to them are still in the database, but the letters themselves are AWOL. Not only that, but the logs confirm that the letters were created and initially saved.

I said to my boss, "it's related to the virus". He declares (rightly) that that's impossible - the virus is gone. I stick to my guns and keep digging in the system logs, before finally understanding what's happened.

In response to the virus, shadowing had been set up by the customer for the server. And just to be extra safe, they shadowed the server that was doing the initial shadowing. A shame that they had to run different shadowing software on each server due to some AV conflict, and it was probably not a good idea to shadow the second server back to the first server (and to the same directory).

Bottom line, the shadowing software applications got in a fight with each other, and we eventually found the missing letters in a hidden folder for conflicted files.

They do conspire and are like spoiled brats looking for attention.

I swear these devices must talk to each other and wait, and wait until you're broke and can't afford to fix things. Last year a hard drive died on my PC. Okay, I spent the $100 for new SSD and I was happy...

Within an hour of replacing the hard disk, I get a call from my brother to go downstairs to the kitchen. The refrigerator decided to become a warming box instead of an icebox.

We get the new fridge and it couldn't be more than a few days later, when his car needed some brake work due to a stuck caliper and then a few days later, the motherboard died on the my PC - the one I had upgraded with an SSD.

This went on for month as we ended up replacing all the appliances including the washer and dryer, and the stove too.

Re: Tech can bite you in unusual ways or Forklift Drivers Revisited

Everything you never wanted to know about about operating a forklift and couldn't be bothered to ask.

It starts like the usual work instruction/safety regulations training video... and turns into something very much like the "Salad Days" sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. Don't mind that it's in German, you'll get it without the dialogue.

As the original article

is about "white goods going bad", here is how to microwave a Microwave.

Yes. Yes, I'm home alone and bored.

But you said they did a drainage check ....

And presumably ignored the results, since even killer roots don't grow that fast

First Corollary of Taber's Second Law

Saved this from somewhere a decade ago... "First Corollary of Taber's Second Law: Machines that piss people off get murdered." - Pat Taber.

Brush up your Shakespeare

When sorrows come, they come not single spies

But in battalions.

Hamlet Act 4, Scene 5

Not much has changed since 1602.