A llama, on the other hand... :-)

Whether it's a coincidence or not, it's fortuitous, isn't it? Writing this before any answer has been given, but it is kind of cool.

Patrick, I've often declared that rubbing a bald man's head is good luck. I may have gotten that from somewhere, but I promote it because I like it.

I could tell you why it's to be tomorrow, but it's much more fun to see everyone speculate, to be honest.

For changes to the user interface, a sheep.

Um. That was GWB's gesture.

Not to say you appropriated it from him.

It's not a ship date, it's a change date. Usually involves heavy-duty maintenance and/or systems tweaking. Not what you're sending to customers, but rather what you're doing to yourself.

"Much like a helicopter's rotor blades."

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nothing but very good luck can ensue from rubbing the not-quite-bald head of a French-Canadian who sounds like Christophe Lambert.

Me fishing for head rubs?

Jamais!

Jamais direz-vous jamais!

That said, may your goats be entertaining (perhaps fainting ones, and a few handy loud noises), and there be no need for the invocation of cowboys to resolve a rodeo situation...

"So. Invisible killer drones."
"Yeah. Keeps getting better."

I hope he's still breathing.

I understand there is a bronze plaque at MIT of George Eastman, with a well polished nose. It has been the tradition for students to rub his nose for luck before taking an exam, and the thousands of test-taking rational engineers have kept George's nose buffed to a shine.

The next attempt may entail somewhat less notice.

An alternative explanation is that the nose is lucky, not for students, but for maintenance staff?

[but yes ... most excellent news!]

The congratulations must be returned with thanks. Read Patrick's note again.

The upgrade failed; we fell back to the previous version. We're going to be investigating why and trying again at another time.

It'd appear that the nose was something of a nostrum.

A rubber chicken may also be needed in case of network issues.

Cadbury (Who has only ever seen goats recommended for SCSI problems)

The upgrade failed; we fell back to the previous version. We're going to be investigating why and trying again at another time.

Not at all! You may not have succeeded with the upgrade, but the rollback -worked-! Given the number of things I've been involved in, where the backout plan boiled down to:

"Run around, scream and shout
Hope to god we sort things out"

... I'm definitely congratulatory! You tried the upgrade... it failed... but the contingency plans (a) existed, and (b) worked!

00:00 "Hi! We're going to take the application down for maintenance. It should only take an hour, three at the worst."
02:00 "Uh, the maintenance is taking a bit longer than expected.
03:00 "We can't get the application going again"
04:00 "We think there's a problem with the database"
05:00 "There's definitely a problem with the database -- one of the tables is corrupted"
06:00 "We can't fix the table -- we need the offsite backups, and it'll take them 2 hours to get here"
08:00 "The application is still offline, and we're still waiting for the backup tapes"
09:00 "The tapes finally arrived, and we're starting to restore from backup"
10:00 "The restore is taking a long time. The next update will be in 4 hours"
14:00 "The restore is done, but we still can't get the database going. We're trying something else."
16:00 "We got the database going, but we're missing data for the last two days. We're going to try and import the missing data."
17:00 "Importing the missing data didn't go so well. We're going to stop doing that, and just bring the app up with the older data."
19:00 "The App is back up again, but missing 2.5 days of data"
19:30 "The App is down again."
20:00 "The App is up again."
21:00 "We're throttling connections to the app so it doesn't fall over again."
22:00 "We're tentatively saying the app is working for now, but we're all watching and crossing our fingers"
24:00 "The app is still running ... and we still need to import the missing data..."

[... and it went on for another day-or-so ...]

Weeks, I tell you. Months. Ongoing. And on some issues, not far short of the next plural in that sequence.

Or Ruby in a Nutshell.

*Very appropriate, that name

"...we need the offsite backups..."
"What offsite backups?"

(true story)

So apply a resist to the parts you want to keep bright, apply the acid to the whole thing. Rinse, an when the effect has the affect you like, buff to an even tone; removing the resist in the process.

I don't recall seeing this sort of thing before just now?

Blogads.com is pushing their "Books" network with a bunch of initiatives, including asking member blogs to run the ad. Since the ads they get us pay for our server expenses, we said sure.

Thanks for the explanation. I had been afraid there had been dueling stylesheets leading to messed-up tables or some such.

... even when you take this rule into account.

I'll trade you the person who got their backup tapes (and mine, and another coworkers, in both cases anxiously awaited, to restore a down service), and promptly put them into their tape jukebox and overwrote them [0]...

[0] Clearly the fact that they had more tapes returned than they were expecting meant that the tapes were spare/extra, not that they -might belong to somebody else- [1]
[1] Descriptives continue to fail me, but that wasn't the most unique thing that particular coworker did...

janetl, #69: AKA "The difficulty for which one is prepared never occurs." It's not infallible, but you'd be surprised how often it appears to work.

The mascot is, "Billy the Goat". One of the allowed things to do to plebes is to say, "Billy the Goat's Balls", at which point they have to run to the goat, slap the scrotum, and run back.

I'm convinced that the typos don't actually exist until the POST button is pressed.

Wait, we don't want to do that, do we? I got turned around somewhere...

Terry Karney @ 77: They have to climb a bit to reach the statue in Hungary - it's on a plinth. But it's nice to see that these rituals are spread far and wide...

This is not the same as a head rub.

Whenever one of our users gripes about such "wasted" efforts, I usually respond with my take on the Murphy/Finagle laws.

Long version: You're insufficiently paranoid; the universe will mess up your plans unless you do something about it, and that mess will probably be very painful to clean up. {Can be expanded as needed into an hour long lecture about Murphy, Finagle, statistics, failing gracefully v. failing spectacularly, learn from my mistakes, etc., etc. Sometimes the mere threat of such a lecture is sufficient to make folks behave.}

Short version: Which way do you want to be wrong (about your expectations)? {Because sooner or later you will be!}