Skip to main content

The risk to technology not enough cats!

It is easy to assume that technology is a magic wand that solves all problems once and for all.   While this is largely true for the Applications on your telephones it is absolutely not the case in complex industrial settings.  

When we built the biodigesters, the vendor was clear: annual maintenance cost was projected to be 5% to 7%.  The vendor even offered a warranty that our maintenance costs would not exceed these levels.  The computer we installed in our tractors, everything has to be removed twice a year to be sent to the manufacturer for repair and maintenance.  

This morning, we got a big, one we had a general failure of our backbone communication system.  The breakdown started a 2:15 AM. We fixed it at 4:41 this afternoon.  Conclusion:  we need more cats on the farm.  Rodents were the cause, they chewed a cheap cable, and the technician took a while to find the fault because he first checked every single device for a fault or short circuit.  On our farm, we have 291 devices attached to the backbone.  

In fact, it was not the technician who found the fault.  He actually called his boss in desperation around 3 pm.  He had checked everything.  At 4:30 the boss came out (it is a Sunday...) and in 11 minutes found the error.  Literally, he plugged the technician's computer into the system, and said "The fault is between 4ZA5 and 4ZA6".   The technician said, boss, I checked the devices.  The boss said: "Did you check the wire for continuity".  A one-minute patch and he was done.  

As he was leaving, I asked what do we need to do?  He said, "Get more cats, It's the first thing I noticed, I didn't see any cats in the shop.  You need more cats to control the rat and mice population".  

This is the moral of the story.  You buy an expensive massive backbone computer system and it is brought down because you don't have enough cats...you just cannot invent such a thing

Note:  I think that's the reason problems with computers became known as bugs because one of the earliest IBM machines was short-circuited because of a roach, hence faults were referred to as bugs...


   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b) ground beef requires process
Post a Comment
Read more

Spray painting Taylor Swift G650 aircraft (updated)

 First, a bit of paint will not harm anyone.  These climate activities are going to learn two things in the next few days:  (1) Trespassing at an airport is a felony almost anywhere in the world.  That means criminal prosecution.   (2) removing paint from an aircraft is expensive.   So these climate activists are about to find out the reach of the British criminal system and it will not be pleasant, the UK has very strict laws about that, I would be surprised if cleaning the aircraft of all the paint will cost less than $100,000.     I am sure that when they planned (premeditation) this little show they had a very valid logic to doing this.  Tonight, they are probably realizing the depth of their troubles.   I understand that in the UK it's a minimum one-year jail sentence.    Also, good luck travelling with a criminal trespass charge against you.  I am relatively certain that the airline industry will slap them with no-fly status. Update;  It seems that what they threw on the airc
Post a Comment
Read more

21st century milk parlour

When we first looked at building our farm in 2018, we made a few money-saving decisions, the most important is that we purchased our milk herd from a retiring farmer and we also purchased his milking parlour equipment.  It was the right decision at the time.  The equipment dates from around 2004/05 and was perfectly serviceable, our installers replaced some tubing but otherwise, the milking parlour was in good shape.  It is a mature technology. Now, we are building a brand new milk parlour because our milking cows are moving from the old farm to the new farm.  So we are looking at brand new equipment this time because, after 20 years of daily service, the old cattle parlour's systems need to be replaced.  Fear not it will not be destroyed instead good chunks will end up on Facebook's marketplace and be sold to other farmers for spare parts or expansion of their current systems. All our cattle are chipped, nothing unusual there, we have sensors throughout the farm, and our milki
Post a Comment
Read more