{"id":666,"date":"2008-03-23T18:52:56","date_gmt":"2008-03-23T23:52:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=666"},"modified":"2008-04-07T11:44:03","modified_gmt":"2008-04-07T16:44:03","slug":"mark-of-the-beast-or-what-happened-to-that-rant-about-sony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=666","title":{"rendered":"Mark of the Beast (or, “what happened to that rant about Sony?”)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Deleted<\/p>\n

Maybe I should’ve just taken Easter off, and left the site alone. Alas, the fact that I hadn’t written anything in a while left me with a bit of guilt, and so I put together this nice, invective-laden piece about Sony turning into a too-big-for-its-britches ghetto brand. You might’ve seen it, for the few hours it was actually up on this site. Coincidentally, I spent two days writing the piece, and I failed to notice that it was article #666 in the scaredpoet.com article database. Oh, what a bad, bad omen that was.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the article is no more. Because shortly after I wrote the article, I sat back to vainly admire the literary fruits of my labor. And then I noticed a curious bug in the site’s code.<\/p>\n

So, I went to fix it. A simple software update should do! Right? No, alas, the software update not only failed to solve the issue, but caused another<\/em> annoying problem. So I tried another fix. Another bug is created!<\/p>\n

Well, now I’m annoyed. So I decide the one way to fix all of this, once and for all, is go directly into the site database and manually edit it.<\/p>\n

MISTAKE.<\/strong><\/p>\n


\nIn a single mouse-click, I managed to push the wrong “x.” And I managed not to delete just the teensy-tiny little piece of the system that was causing me so much trouble, but the WHOLE GODDAMN DATABASE<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And with that sickening “click” of my Mighty Mouse<\/a>, kind friends, three and a half years of rantings were obliterated in a mere 400 microseconds of CPU time<\/a>. Needless to say, I felt quite sick seeing the end result displayed proudly and dutifully by my web server (after all, it has expediently done exactly what I told it to<\/em>).<\/p>\n

After FREAKING OUT for a few minutes, I remembered that fortunately for my sanity (and for rabid Tripp Eisen<\/a> fans everywhere), I had a full backup of the database from last Thursday. Also luckily, the article I was working on for later in the week was still in a browser window, ready to be cut-and-paste back into its rightful location. So, not all was lost. But, the Evil Sony Article remains MIA, as being mere hours old, there was no surviving copy. I may re-write it, but it probably won’t be as good.<\/p>\n

End result: the site was down for about 30 minutes while I A. Panicked, screamed and bashed my head into a wall, and B. breathed into a paper bag while I waited for my last backup to decrypt and mount… and, also for the stars in my field of vision to clear enough for me to see the screen.<\/p>\n

Fuck, what a Sunday. But, I think I nailed that bug! \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n

interestingly, THIS article is now post #666. We’ll see how long this lasts, until the next calamity occurs.<\/p>\n

In other news: there may be a 2-hour-or-so downtime in about 32 days, when the new version of ubuntu<\/a> goes live. Of course that means I’ll be upgrading this puppy to that new OS as soon as it hits. While it is a bit quirky, ubuntu is a nice linux distro that is very well-supported by a dedicated team of volunteers. If you’re thinking about tinkering with linux, or even want to host a website or run a web server, I highly recommend it. It’s permitted this site to see stability unseen back in the bad old days when it was hosted on a windows server.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: Good news! Buried among my mess of open windows was a slightly older draft of The Sony Rant. So you might see it back soon!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe I should’ve just taken Easter off, and left the site alone. Alas, the fact that I hadn’t written anything in a while left me with a bit of guilt, and so I put together this nice, invective-laden piece about Sony turning into a too-big-for-its-britches ghetto brand. You might’ve seen it, for the few hours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-maintenance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}