Monday, August 15, 2016

Power Cycling

Outfit and Gaming Twins--Monday, 8/17/16

I enjoyed reading how this outfit came together.  She was wearing this skirt when she went shopping, and she bought the scarf and tried on a navy striped sweater during the trip.  She liked it so well she photographed it for later outfit inspiration. 

From just-another-smith.blogspot.com

My version also featured a navy vest because this is like the Year of the Open Weave Cardigan Vest around here.  (I clearly find the combination of the striped top and matching vest irresistible).


Cobalt blue skirt (eShakti), $5.83/wear
Navy short-sleeved striped top (St Johns Bay/JCP), $1.60/wear
Navy sleeveless cardigan vest (thrifted, Tommy Hilfiger), $0.38/wear
Aqua scarf (Target), $1.95/wear
Light grey wedges by BCBGeneration, $5.00/wear

Outfit total: $14.76/wear

She also talked about playing Carcassonne for the first time...which reminds me that Robert and I need to play that game again.


Speaking of white and blue, the bun in the foreground is a blue-eyed white, and his friend in the background is a red-eyed white.  As I talked about before, a red-eyed white is an albino rabbit with recessive cc genes (for "Coloration") in which no coloration is produced.  The blue-eyed white has recessive vv genes (for "Vienna") in which no coloration is produced except in the iris of the eye.  As is common with blue coloration in bird feathers, for example, the "blue" of the eyes is actually an optical illusion resulting from the combination of normal and missing pigmentation.  (See more about blue-eyed whites here.)  In both cases, the white rabbits can be bred to rabbits without these recessive genes that interrupt the pigmentation and have "normal"-looking kits because they still carry the genetic recipe for producing black self, lilac otter, etc. rabbits.


Among Katy and Leo's offspring was a rabbit that looked like Katy (a brownish "castor" color) but had one white foot.  The genetic basis for that Michael Jackson gloved paw has always been mysterious to me...until now!  A rabbit with one V gene and one v gene is called a Vienna carrier.  Because the V gene is incompletely dominant over the v gene, these Vienna carriers can have small white patches in their fur.  (According to the link above, this is a common issue when attempting to breed blue-eyed white rabbits.)  So this suggests that either Katy or Leo was a Vienna carrier.  The reason we got Kate and Leo in the first place was because the breeder that had them decided to get rid of them.  Figuring out that one of them was a Vienna carrier would explain why the breeder made that decision.

In other news...Power cycling sounds like an Olympic sport but is in fact, as I discovered today, the term for turning a piece of computer equipment off and on again.

What happened is this.  At work this morning, the shared drive my department uses was running extremely slowly...sometimes eventually opening a folder or file, but often just not responding.  I called the help desk to tell them this, and the guy who answered the phone said...

IT Crowd meme via Pinterest

No, that's not what he said at all, although I did try turning my computer off and on again before I called!

Instead, he said, If you are having trouble opening a folder, that's a problem with your computer, not the server.  I explained (again) that I was having this problem when trying to open a folder on the shared drive, but that opening a file on my own computer and on my travel drive was not a problem.  Then he seemed to get the issue and said someone would look into it.

Not trusting this guy, I then submitted a service desk ticket.  My local helpful tech suggested I turn off the wifi on my laptop then log out and in again to see if that improved performance.  (When I was telling Robert this tale, he said that works for them at his office frequently.)  When I responded that it didn't help, he directed the service desk to kick this up to the network team.

After some time passed the network team guy responded that he was also finding the drive "mostly unresponsive" and that he didn't know why and that he might have to "power cycle" the server in a bit.  At this point, I googled "power cycle."

A couple hours later, after power cycling the server, he asked me to try again and huzzah, all was well!

This was around 12:30 or so, just in time for my boss to send me an email asking if I could run an analysis prior to a 2:00 meeting.  I said yes, now that the network team has restored functionality to the shared drive, I can.  He said, Oh, I'm glad you got that taken care of, it's been driving [a couple of them] crazy for the last few hours [in a meeting up on the executive floor].

What is crazy about this to me is that it took over 4 hours for somebody to fix the server...by turning it off and on again!  I recognize that doing this to a server is a bit different from doing it to a computer, but still, I was amused that if the tech dudes had taken their own classic advice, they could have been done with this thing hours earlier.

I also learned from Robert's experiences at work today with their HR server being fubar that turning a server off and on again is also called "bouncing" the server.  They will be bouncing a server he works with this evening.

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