CSotD: I’ve Looked at CrowdStrike from Both Sides Now

Scott Hilburn wins the Fortuitous Timing Award, though if he’d run today’s Argyle Sweater (AMS) 24 hours earlier, he might be up for a Pulitzer. Yes, it’s a different form of airline chaos, but given his lead time, I think he did pretty well.

Besides, the types of chaos that ensued appear to have been fairly diverse. I heard that they were making hand-written boarding passes in South Korea and that Ben Gurion Airport in Israel was doing well while the main problem at Heathrow was that they couldn’t send passenger manifests to Homeland Security in the US for clearance, which put all flights there on hold.

Since these devils aren’t looking at blue screens, I have to assume that Hell runs on Apple, which fits in with Pride being one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

xkcd doesn’t have to fret over timing and was able to come up with this, though there’s something odd in being able to post a cartoon on-line based on everything being down.

However, I wouldn’t have known about the outage if I hadn’t read about it on-line and then heard reports on NPR and talked about it with a remote-working friend at the dog park who also wasn’t effected.

And I got a laff out of Matt’s piece, as well.

I don’t think anyone working with any sort of lead time will be able to wring much humor out of the crash, but I suppose we might see Some Very Serious Commentary in the days to come.

Someone at the park yesterday pointed out that if we could screw things up this badly with a simple updating error, imagine what someone could do if they were really trying to crash the system?

Glen LeLievre offers this commentary on our growing vulnerability and posted it with a #CrowdStrike hashtag, but it seems more long range than that.

For instance, when people first began posting AI pics on social media, I’d comment about what an insult it was to real artists, but there’s so much of that stuff up there now that protesting it seems futile.

There are any number of times you have to take my word that I told you so, but in this case, not only am I on the record but, by happenstance, it was 30 years and three days ago that I told you so in a column, discussing Forrest Gump and a Photoshopped Newsday illustration that showed Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan skating together.

I won’t bore you with the whole thing. I’ll only bore you with this excerpt:

To which I would add that anybody following the lunatic speculation about last Saturday’s shootings has seen plenty of evidence of the combination of gullibility and paranoia that leaves a large number of people open to suggestion.

Airline schedules and hospital records are only the tip of a very large iceberg.

F-Minus (AMS), meanwhile, reminds me not of file folders but of those manila envelopes we used to circulate in offices. They had lines on the front for you to sign after you read the material inside, after which you’d pass it on to the next person in your department.

I ain’t no Luddite and email was sure an improvement on that system.

Ben (MWAM) also brought back an ancient memory of when magazines reeked of aftershave and cologne blow-in cards. I chuckled, but then thought, “Do they still have those things?”

I meant smelly blow-in cards. I know there are still a few magazines, because if you subscribe to something on-line, they sometimes make you take the print version, too.

As you may have gathered, my entire three-dimensional life centers on the dog park, which is about seven miles from home. We go once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and this The Other Coast (Creators) is not entirely true to life, because the drool is mostly spread around on the windows, not dribbled down into their mechanism.

But one thing I had to learn in going from 100-pound ridgebacks to a 20-pound Danish-Swedish farmdog is to lock the windows because she stands on the armrest to see out, and frequently winds up with a paw on the switch.

I’ve commented before on the need to keep parent/child interactions up-to-date, and Zits (KFS) does a decent job of it. Jeremy’s grandparents might have been in college during the Vietnam War, but not his own folks.

Family Guy isn’t a good touchstone, since it began 26 years ago, which is good, but it’s still on the air, or on the cable or on the WIFI or whatever things are on these days. (But see comments)

But my alma mater did indeed have a post-Vietnam-War protest in 1983 when one of the two dininghalls failed to provide the usual Captain Crunch. That would still make Jeremy’s dad too old, but it’s an indication of the bathos that reigned on campus after the war and until relatively recently.

Drew Litton, OTOH, gets to play Grumpy Old Man with this commentary on the rebirth of Casa Bonita, which was also known as “Casa Velveeta” by Denver-area parents who viewed it much as they viewed Chuckie Cheese: As a place you hoped your folks would take the grandkids so you wouldn’t have to.

However, the South Park creators — who grew up not in Hartsell or Fairplay but in Littleton, a Denver suburb — were among the kids who begged to go to Casa Velveeta, and they used their riches to purchase and refurbish the place.

However, as Litton notes, admission is by ticket only, which for at least some of us brings up the old joke that first prize is two tickets and second prize is four tickets.

Especially now that we’re the grandparents who would be expected to accept the mission.

Let’s end with some good news. Or bad news.
Your choice.

First Dog on the Moon sticks a finger in the boss’s eye, which either means this is the last time we’ll see him or that the Guardian is one of the few remaining journalism outlets with a brain, spine and conscience.

For myself, I have days of being a realistic pessimist and days of being a deluded optimist, and mostly days when those two sound pretty much like the same thing.

Ask me again tomorrow.