16-XII-2013.
We finally gave up and bought a freezerbox. We had one long ago, perehaps in 1983. or thereabouts, Obod's, montenegrin make („lying, yet working“). At first we kept it in the garage. Then we brought it here when we moved, and put it in the basement. Seeing how the basement may be flooded at some point, we lifted it 12cm, that's what beams we had - leftovers from the roof. When we went to the US, we moved it back to dad's garage, where it stood for years (and was used, IIRC); theirs was moved into ours kitchen, under the window where our table was (it's still there). Then he wanted to get rid of it, not having any use for it, so we told him to just sell it. It happened just a year or two ago, and he was lucky not to have to pay to have it taken away. But it was quite usable, nothing broken, just that its lid got slightly warped, we had to keep something heavy on it, so the warm air wouldn't seep in. It would regularly reach -18, worked like a dragon, but there, we thought we wouldn't need it for the two of us.
Now it turns out we do need one, and that getting rid of it was a fuckup. Because you can't buy a freon freezerbox, it's all propane or butane now, and of course it's usually the cheaper of the two, which becomes liquid at some ridiculously small distance below zero, so you can't keep it outside. The compressor breaks when it tries to compress a liquid. Which is why we can't put it on the terrace, must be inside. Well fuckit. In the shop they said that there are no more appliances using freon, none at all.
And then Mića says our AC uses freon. And so does every car AC. There you go.
m$'s pearl for today. To avoid suffering with various methods of running this or that piece of code at premeditated times, we (of Firriver) decided to use the scheduler which is already turned on and has all we need - the eskewell server. These jobs which can be scheduled are called agents in it, fuck me if I know why, it's m$, their naming conventions are known for serving extremely stiff drinks and general madness. True, this can do only what can be done within the esqueueel server, which also includes running external code, and then that means just about anything is possible. And we didn't need such exotica this time, we only needed to pass SMS messages to patients - reminders to take their meds, pay the bill, come tomorrow, whatever. And that was done by creating records in the sender app's database, so all within the server.
And then we ran into something like this. Which means, if the server was booted at, whenever, midnight, and the agent should be launched in the morning, won't can do, because nobody touched the agent all night, and m$ came to the conclusion that it can be turned off. Now nobody but admin knows how to turn it on, but they don't care. And all of a sudden someone notices that the messages aren't sent, rush, panic... okay, someone noticed this, but the thing must have been on the server's desktop, where, as a rule, nobody sits. Even the admin has his own machine and does everything from it. So the system messages of this kind can be unnoticed for hours.
And, so typical of them, „some services...“ - and doesn't say what does it depend on, and where can it be set.
Fuckit, what level of nincompoops. Judging by the existence of this screenshot (and fisix others) on my disk, it was probably me who had to endure the ordeal. Will m$ ever do something right?
Mentions: Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Majkrosoft (m$), Mića the electrician, in serbian
8-XII-2021 - 26-III-2026