Eagerly Awaiting My Egg Bot!

I first met my new best-friend-to-be at the 2010 Maker Faire in San Mateo. The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball size to that of a small grapefruit-- roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (4 - 10 cm). Super adjustable; designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally "impossible" to print on. Not just eggs but golf balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, eye balls and even things like wine glasses-- with a bit of work.

My order will be satisfied from the first production run of the kit -- I know, liable to be snafu's along the way, but that's half (actually 99%) of the fun. When it get bored with imprinting my picture on Ben Wa Balls I'll send it down to Emma at Harvey Mudd to play with.

Honey, did I put the parking brake on....?

Even More on Chase' Outages

Datacenterknowledge.com has more information about last the outage experienced by Chase.com. One of the most telling comments is "The company said its web site crashed Monday evening when a third party vendor’s database software corrupted the log-in process."Now, where I come from if your web site blows up you take responsibility for it and don't go pointing fingers at 3P's (including CDN's - think you may have a problem with 1? Then execute agreements with 3). Pointing fingers at Oracle is just bad form. Chase selected the database and operates it - one would presume that (a) they would have at least one form of redundancy, (b) they would have done much better end-to-end testing and (c) would have been able to fail-over to their standby systems much faster than 12+ hours.

Still pisses me off their their CS folks vacillate between "it was a failure" and "it was scheduled outage".

Chase Responds

With all the ups and downs recently with the Chase website I prompted the company to come clean - was the downtime scheduled or unscheduled? This is the response I received:

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience you are experiencing trying to access our website.

Please be informed that from time to time we need to perform maintenance on our website. Since this maintenance is planned it is termed as scheduled maintenance.

Further, since your concern will require a more thorough review of your account and will require additional questions to be answered, I am unable to assist you by e-mail. Please contact us at the number listed below so that we may assist you in resolving this issue. Representatives are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you have any further questions, please reply using the Secure Message Center.

Thank You,

Pramila Fernandes
E-Mail Customer Service Representative

Bearing in mind that I also have e-mail from Chase that says:

I am writing in response to your inquiry about not being able to see your account information online.

Please be advised that we were experiencing technical difficulties with our website. Our technicians have corrected this issue and the website is now available online. If you still face any difficulties, please call our technical department on the number mentioned below.

Chase staff members appear to be rather conflicted. What confounds the imagination is that (a) Chase has to take their site down for hours at a time to preform "scheduled maintenance" and (b) why don't they tell customers ahead of time that the site will be down so they can plan accordingly? It's not like they have our money or anything important....oh, wait....

(I also love the fact that questions about site availability require a "more thorough review of my account" - I wish I made enough money such that my billions could cause them problems. Sadly not.)