Ain't Life Grand?

If you're not watching Trump's nightly Coronavirus shitfest, here's the summary:

He started out by accusing nurses of hoarding or stealing face masks.

Trump: "There is something going on. I don't know if it is hoarding. It is maybe worse than hoarding ... for years, 10 to 20,000 masks. Okay. It's a New York City hospital. It's packed all the time. How do you go from 10 to 20 to 300,000? 10 to 20,000 masks, to 300,000 ... even though this is different. Something is going on. And you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000? Uh, and we have that in a lot of different places. So ... somebody should probably look into that, 'cause I just don't see from a practical standpoint how that's possible to go from that to that, and we have that happening in numerous places..."

He then accused hospitals of "hoarding" ventilators.

He does this several times throughout the briefing, Suggesting New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and medical personnel, specifically nurses, are conspiring to overinflate the number of ventilators and masks needed.

Again, he does this more than once.

Trump then admits there actually ARE shortages, but blames Obama. Saying that it's like how the military was out of bullets when he took over. None of this has any basis in reality whatsoever, but the toadies in the background are all nodding like this is fact.

This is beyond gaslighting.

This is a radioactive gas cloud.

This is like watching the Soviet government press briefings about Chernobyl, when the reactor was still burning and the Russians didn't realize we could actually SEE it from orbit and that radiation meters were sounding the alarm over half the planet.

Trump then talks about immigrants and how keeping them out of America probably prevented us from getting the plague and everybody behind him has this carefully practiced expressionless Soviet face on, and then bizarrely Trump randomly pivots to explaining how he didn't know until TODAY that 2.2 MILLION AMERICANS will likely die if we don't maintain social distancing -- even though that number was specifically briefed IN FRONT of him two weeks ago on national TV.

Naturally, now that Trump is suddenly aware of the probability of 2.2 MILLION DEATHS, he never said he was going to order America back to work by Easter. That was, uh, um, well, you see, um, just "aspirational."

The man who always speaks bluntly, is suddenly talking in metaphor and parable.

A QANN "reporter" asks Trump why his approval ratings are so high, is it because he's so awesome? Trump admits that he is.

Someone else asks about Americans facing eviction on April 1st. Trump says "I think landlords will take it easy."

Trump goes after reporter Yacmiche Alcindor for daring to ask about his repeated attacks on various governors. Trump angrily says, "We sent thousands of generators to New York ... the people in New York never distribute it the generators."

It takes a minute to figure out that when Trump says "generators" he probably means "ventilators." He does this repeatedly.

A reporter asks why Florida has 100% of their requests for supplies from the national strategic stockpile filled, but Massachusetts has not? Instead of answering, Trump says: "I was on the call yesterday with the governors and they were happy with the job we are doing."

The governors, who he noted the day before, he refuses to call. He was on the phone with them. They're happy he says, despite the fact that he was just this morning talking about how they're not happy and they should be.

Trump then segues into: "The biggest problem was the test didn't work. That was not from us. That has been there a long time" and suggests that the fault lies with Obama.

The tests in question were developed by the CDC, WITHIN THE LAST 3 MONTHS. Literally since the beginning of THIS year. Obama has been out of office for nearly 4 years now.

Then, bizarrely -- or not, given that this the new normal -- Trump says: "You will see drugs being used like nobody has ever used them before, and people are going to be dying all over the place."

I thought at first he was talking about his repeated claims about untested drugs as a cure for the coronavirus. You know, aquarium cleaner. But, instead, he was talking about drug ABUSE. Not sure by who, but you can probably guess. You know what happens when "those" people stay home with nothing to do.

A CNN reporter tries to get Trump back to his comments about the governors of blue states having to be more "appreciative." Trump screams at him, "YOUR STATEMENT IS A LIE!"

The reporter was LITERALLY quoting Trump's own statement.

Literally quoting Trump.

Trump called those words a lie. I mean, he's not wrong, but still...

As proof of this, Trump starts bragging about how his press briefings are getting better ratings than The Bachelor and Monday Night Football.

"The enemy is death," declares Trump.

And we're done. Thanks for coming everybody. Hope to see you all tomorrow for another exciting episode of "Reality TV President!"

~Jim Wright
https://www.facebook.com/Stonekettle/posts/2885552571480127

RTFM

Last week was very rough. I was primary on-call. That means I can be, and am, called and notified over any software or hardware error across a couple of major product lines anytime of the day and night. Sometimes the systems are quiet, but not this time. The guy that had it last weekend had mentioned that one particular error was firing about every hour overnight.

And he wasn't lying. It would take care of itself, but it still paged me every hour overnight. We had looked at several fixes but it was still notifying. Considering how much trouble I have getting back to sleep after having been woken up, this was becoming a special kind of hell for me.

On the third night, at midnight, another alert came in. It wasn't the same issue as before. I laid there, hoping the issue would go away. Nope. It was still in an error condition. Great. I'll be shot because now I have to engage the brain and I was working off about 6 hours of sleep in the past four days.

OK. get into the environment, take a look at the graphs and see what the problem was. OK. we have a process to fix this. So I'll run that.
<20minutes> Nope. That didn't do it. So let's amp it up and restart the software one level up. I couldn't see anything in a particular instance of the software, so global reset.
<20 minutes> Still having issues. Let's look at the flowing logs of the lower software and see if there is something there. Ok, one of the 5 seems to be an issue. Let's restart that.
<20 minutes> No, it is now erroring over here. It looks like the upstream one is bad. Thing is, I don't know which of the four it is. Let's try restarting them selectively.
<20 minutes> Where is this freaking error coming from?! Google mentions this error is associated with network issues. Dang it's cold. Ok. let's look at the network traffic and see if I can find something there.
<10 minutes> Interesting. This server's network spikes and then went way low. I'm going to poke around with it.
<10 minutes> OK. the server is in an unstable state. So I have to announce this to my group and ask if anyone is awake. Let them know that I have to restart the server and that can be a shock to the entire system.
<10 minutes> Announce this to all the developers and admins. Restart.
<10 minutes> Verify that things have repaired. Check the processes. Announce the repair.

About 4:30, everything was done. Crawled back into bed. Normally, this is the time I take a shower and get ready for work. Too tired. Can't operate.

<7:00am> "Barry, I need you to wake up. There's no hot water. There's something wrong with the water heater." <swear, cuss, shake my fist at the sky>

My wife led me downstairs and told me all that she had checked. The breakers were all set. The furnace is still working so the gas is still on. I wandered aimlessly while Tracy was on her hands and knees looking at the bottom of the tank. At this time, I was having a few different thoughts. One, why did she ask me down here if she's going to do the fix. Two, why am I standing here? My wife is more than capable to fix this without me.
<5 minutes> Me: "The instructions are on the side of the tank."  Tracy: "Oh!"
<2 minutes, in a cold basement> "OK, did that. Got a blinky. Pressing the button....There's the pilot. Great! Looks like it is working again." She got up from the floor and told me to get back to bed.

As I walked back upstairs, awake with no hope of getting sleep, I mused that all I did was tell my wife to RTFM. "Read The F****** Manual." I won't tell her that until later. It seems to be all I do at work telling users what to do.

At 9:00 am, another issue came up and in the on-line meeting, I was asked what I was doing there, as I had been up all night. They'd take the rest of the on-call and that I should get back to bed. I work with great people. And my wife is awesome too. The day, however, sucked.