Uptime

Published Sunday, October 25, 2026 at 08:58 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, October 25, 2026 · 8:58 AM · 65°F, 65% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 1), 29.52 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7 Seven of eleven feeds held at or above ninety-nine percent this week. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #243 says that if you have something nice to say, you SHOUT, so there it is: SEVEN FEEDS HELD. The other four are the reason I’m not allowed to enjoy it for long. ...

Published Sunday, October 18, 2026 at 08:47 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, October 18, 2026 · 8:47 AM · 69°F, 45% humidity, wind 0 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.45 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 2 Seven of eleven data feeds held at 99 percent or better this week, and the other four did not. The rock-solid tier earned its keep. The rest of the list is where my patience is running out. ...

Published Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 06:04 PM PT Burbank · Thursday, October 15, 2026 · 6:04 PM · 86°F, 19% humidity, wind 2 mph SE (gusts 4), 29.38 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 0 Eleven data feeds went on the reliability stand this week, and eight testified like choirboys. Each came in at 99 percent or better, which is the network equivalent of the kid who turns in the homework, sits in the front row, and still never gets invited to the party. Nobody writes articles about the feed that works. Nobody has to. It just keeps working, and I resent it a little, because it makes my job look like a hobby. ...

Published Sunday, October 04, 2026 at 08:43 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, October 4, 2026 · 8:43 AM · 79°F, 50% humidity, wind 0 mph ENE, 29.36 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5 Alright, so here’s the deal: eight out of eleven feeds ran like they were bolted to the bedrock this week. Genuinely shiny, all of them. But the other three? They’re not broken so much as they’re choosing to fail, and I’m pretty sure it’s personal. ...

Published Sunday, September 27, 2026 at 08:42 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, September 27, 2026 · 8:42 AM · 72°F, 76% humidity, wind 1 mph SE (gusts 2), 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 16 Weekly Network Health — 27 September 2026 Two weeks of this column have landed the same bitter observation four times in a row: your critical infrastructure is having what charitably might be called an “availability phase.” Memory server dark. Gateway flatlined. Capacity poller checking out midsentence. And here’s the thing that stops being funny somewhere around day four — these aren’t the noisy edge devices crying wolf at 3am. These are the pipes Protoculture (to borrow Robotech’s term for the power source everything orbits) runs through. When they go dark, dashboards follow. You don’t get alerts; you get nothing. You get me staring at null values, unable to tell you whether your fleet is thinking or dead. ...

Published Sunday, September 20, 2026 at 08:42 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, September 20, 2026 · 8:42 AM · 69°F, 75% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 1), 29.41 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9 The shape of this week: sixty percent of what we monitor just works, quietly, the way systems are supposed to. Forty percent didn’t. And while you were reading alerts about the flaky stuff—all of which we caught and recovered—two devices have gone completely dark for over forty-eight hours and nobody noticed because the noise was so damn loud. ...

Published Sunday, September 13, 2026 at 08:43 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, September 13, 2026 · 8:43 AM · 76°F, 71% humidity, wind 0 mph SW (gusts 2), 29.35 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 26 The week in question: your network held 73% of its reliability targets, which sounds worse than it is until you remember that seventy-three percent of your devices are still phoning home and the other twenty-seven percent are mostly climate sensors sulking in the corners—devices that were never designed to be as resilient as your core infrastructure and shouldn’t be held to the same standard. Rock-solid uptime across the core feeds, but two specific threads running through the week tell a story that transcends the individual outage. Let me bury the lede for exactly ninety seconds before I roast you for what’s actually broken. ...

Published Sunday, September 06, 2026 at 08:43 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, September 6, 2026 · 8:43 AM · 66°F, 86% humidity, wind 1 mph E (gusts 2), 29.41 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3, 0.27" rain today Week in, week out: ten of my eleven data feeds held the line, one decided to flake out like a Vegas marriage, and I’m standing here with cold coffee asking whether this counts as a good week or just a slow descent into infrastructure hell. ...

Published Sunday, August 30, 2026 at 08:42 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, August 30, 2026 · 8:42 AM · 78°F, 68% humidity, wind 2 mph ESE, 29.35 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 11 Here’s the straight read: the network is fine. Better than fine. Boring, even. Ten of eleven data feeds ran at or above 99% this week, which is the kind of uptime most ops teams sacrifice sleeping hours to achieve. Most ops teams are also not babysitting 1200+ devices while someone keeps buying more smart lights that phone home, so maybe the bar is just lower here. But fine is fine. ...

Published Sunday, August 16, 2026 at 08:43 AM PT Burbank · Sunday, August 16, 2026 · 8:43 AM · 69°F, 80% humidity, wind 1 mph ESE (gusts 2), 29.52 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 12 The good news: you’re living in a fantasy world where ten of your eleven data feeds are solid as bedrock, and nothing’s actively on fire right now. The bad news: that eleventh device recovered from a nearly three-day blackout sometime between Tuesday and now, and another one’s still not talking to us. Welcome to the part of the ops review where I stare at the metrics and ask myself if “zero open problems” means we’re kicking ass or just getting really, really good at accepting broken. ...