[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Hitch

We have one if push comes to shove. And of course, I have double-stacked UPSes for the "big computer," the main 'puter for the biz. Natch--we might roast to death, bygod, but the data is safe! :-)

Worst case, you shut down gracefully.

I have unfond memories of the Great Northeast Blackout, where the power grid had a catastrophic failure. I had enough warning to gracefully shut down the servers in my computer room before the lights went out. And Verizon supplied its own power to telco lines, so my phone worked, and I could stay in touch with my employers while I monitored progress and knew when power was restored to the area my office was in and I could wander over and start bringing things back up.

In another instance, I got a call at home from my office late shift that they couldn't get to a couple of my servers. I could get in remote from home. Okay, put dinner on hold and go to the office (which was in walking distance) to check. I walk in an everybody is sitting on their hands. Both servers are down. I bring them back up and my irony meter pegged off scale as the Big Mutha UPS they were plugged into glitched and put both down again. Unplug stuff from that server, find other places to plug it in, bring the servers back up and do the needed file system cleanup so people could work again, and queue the failed UPS for shipment elsewhere.

Return home for a belated dinner and go to bed. At 2am, the office calls again. The night supervisor is trying to generate nightly reports and can't get to the NT server where the templates live. I blink sleep from my eyes, specify a couple of things she can try to reach the server, and say "If they don't work, leave a note on my desk. I'll send the reports for you in the morning." At 2:30am, I get another call from the supervisor, She just wants to tell me she sent the reports and I didn't need to worry. Er, leave a note on my desk?

Their next day I was at an integration meeting. My company was being merged and acquired, and we were discussing how to handle the tech end. Another participant was the SVP who had originally hired me. Larry said "How are you, Dennis?" and I said "Tired!" and explained why. When I got to the 2am and 2:30am calls, his eyes got very big, and he said "Why was she calling you at those times in the morning over something that trivial?" "It's because she doesn't know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job and cross Is and dot Ts. I respect that, which is why she's still alive. She needs to be told it's trivial by her boss, and I've already had that conversation with him."

Not long after, she was laid off, and my "reading between the lines" analysis of why was "Too stupid to do the job."

We still have above-ground power lines out here. Take that, high winds and high pull (power-usage) on days when it's 106-108 (or more) and everybody's home? Oy.

They are all buried below ground here. Of course, nature can find ways to harm those too. Queue Hurricane Sandy, where peak hurricane coincided with high tide. ConEd's CEO said "When it gets into your power distribution system, salt water is not your friend." He was quite right. Everything in Manhattan below 34th Street (including the building I lived in) was Lights Out territory for a week or so. (We camped out with a fieiend in Brooklyn who still had power till the lights came back on.

It's like bandaids, in my humble opinion. The faster you pull it off...

Yep. There isn't a nice way to fire people, only necessary ones.

It's hard to blame the agent, either. I mean, after all, the agent's job (and payment) is to SELL the book. If you've ever read Maas's "Writing the Breakout Novel...", he tells many stories about his clients who've gone off into other areas, written books that didn't sing..self-destructed their (selling) careers. Agents often consider it their jobs, their remit, to ensure that doesn't happen. {shrug}.

I didn't blame the agent either, but the job of an agent is to represent their client, and their responsibilities do not extend to telling client what to write. All they can reasonably talk about is what they think they can sell.

I've met Donald Maas, incidentally, and the agent we are discussing works for his agency.

He gave an amusing presentation years back. He writes under pseudonyms when not agenting. One of his pseudonymous efforts was a YA romance. The love interest for his YA female protagonist was a TV star with his own loft. In YA romances here, there must not only be no sex - there must be no opportunity for sex. The setup in that book presented interesting challenges...

Ditto. Nor for family. ALWAYS a disaster.

I think I've lost count of the enterprises that have come to grief because they were family owned, grew large enough to require professional management, and suffered from disagreements in the family over who got to do what. Media outfit Viacom had a widely reported falling out between CEO Sumner Redstone and has daughter and heir apparent. I've no idea what the dinner table dynamics in that family were, but it looked a lot from the outside like dad who was slowly failing and knew it unable to pass along the reins.

I honestly don't know what it was. He said, more than once, that he couldn't remember anything any longer and I did wonder if it was aging. I don't know, but OMG, it was frustrating to have to actually go over the same ground with him more than once, when he'd received a rather steep publisher's discount. Salt, meet open wound.

A friend I had a long conversation the other night with a friend is dealing with that. She works for a mail order outfit. The CEO who is her boss wants to retire and sell the business. But she is increasingly forgetful and befuddled. Queue lots of "I don't understand!" "I just explained it last week and you said you understood it then. Let me explain it one more time..." conversations.

You can, of course, create a humongous concordance. And then whittle it down, but...jeeze. I do not understand how ANYONE could think that a piece of software could adequately read and analyze content enough to "decide" which references to, say, "Irish Setters" out of 50 should be included in a subject-matter index without human intervention and guidance.

I'm not sure that's possible. What I would want is for the soft to search and identify all such instances so I can decide which should be indexed.

This, btw, is commonplace. We're asked to "make indices" all the time, as if it's exactly that. Push a button, out pops an index like the morning's ablutions. When I explain that the cheapest way to an index is for the author to actually do the work HIM/HERself, (gasp!) by working through the book and tagging the references, (from which we could then import that to InDesign, creating the index, retaining the tags, in case the layout changes, yadda), you'd think I'd suggested sacrificing small children to Mayan Gods. URGH.

It's worse. You are asking authors to do boring stuff and actually know how to use their tools. Oh, the horror! All they want to do is write wonderful prose and everything else will be taken care of by magic...

I'm still not sure that either was true. I do suspect that it was indeed aging and that he'd simply forgotten it all. But Sweet Moses on a Pony, it made for a very, very long two (lengthy academic) books!

I respect and admire you, but I fear this is a "better you than me!" instance.

It's like a pratfall - hilarious if you aren't the one falling.
______
Dennis