Specifically What Caused the Temporary Shutdown of QFTR

In the last year your Quest for the Ring (QFTR) writer/producer has been absolutely hammered with damage and losses caused by failures of organizations it depends on. As always it could have been even worse, but the last 12 months have been really, really nasty bad. Unlike with previous temporary shutdowns, this time I am going to be more specific about the causes. I owe that to the three regular readers (laugh out loud, and seriously, I think I actually have more than that many).

The biggest culprits this time have been the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the electric utility company which services QFTR headquarters.

THE IRS FIASCO
The IRS has been grossly incompetent in dealing with fraudulent tax returns filed electronically by criminals using stolen names, social security numbers and birth dates. Remarkably, the IRS has been seen to be treating completely fraudulent tax returns, ones for which there is no backup documentation and which are backed up by nothing in the real world, as legitimate, valid returns, for more than a year after their filing. In other words, even when there is no documentation or real world facts to back up anything at all on the fraudulent return filed by the criminal, the IRS has persisted in treating that return as legitimate and valid for more than a year.

So the IRS (and thus the US government) has been ripped off by the criminals, who have combined cyber crime, identity theft, and old fashioned fraudulent document filing to rip off the hapless and easily duped IRS. More specifically, the IRS has been duped into sending "refunds" to criminals based on completely false returns that are not backed up by anything (for example, not backed up by 1099 forms).

Then the IRS to some extent has tried to hound the identity theft victims (including your QFTR writer/producer) to pay them back for their mistakes. But if the victim pays, not only is he paying for something he or she doesn’t owe for, but worse, fraud investigators and prosecutors might use that as evidence that the victim is actually the criminal (because he or she is acknowledging ownership of the return by paying on it). So in that scenario he or she might possibly be falsely prosecuted for the crimes.

So if you are ever the victim if identity theft in general and of tax return identity theft in particular, my strong advice (and I am an accounting and economics professional by the way) is that you do not make any payments related to the fraud(s). More broadly, you should never do anything that might be construed as you acknowledging that you have something to do with the fraudulent filing(s). To say anything more about what to do in the event if identity theft would be well beyond the scope of even this comment and it would be even more grossly off the topic of basketball than we already are.

As of right now the ball is completely in the IRS' court. What we are investigating at the moment is whether the IRS will stoop to the level of demanding that a victim of identity theft will be demanded to pay for two different tax returns for the same year, one of them completely fraudulent and filed by a criminal. That is, the victim has at this point filed a real, legitimate, correct tax return and has paid his taxes in full. Even after the real, legitimate return has been filed and paid for, will the IRS persist in demanding to be compensated for money that the criminal ripped off from the IRS due to the gross incompetence of the IRS? The jury is still out as to whether they will stoop that low or not.

As a result of all of this IRS incompetence, more than 100 hours of work was needed for investigation, research, and reporting on the incidents, the incompetence of the IRS, and the resulting threats of additional mayhem. These hours had to be stolen in the short term from other projects. They were mostly stolen from QFTR because the other projects were already mostly shut down due to having to babysit other organizations and due to the overall and general lack of sufficient time for all of the projects.

THE ELECTRICITY FIASCO
In general the US electric system is breaking down due to it becoming too old to be reliable and due therefore to inadequate maintenance, updating, and improvements. Electric utility companies (like so many other large corporations) are sitting on huge amounts of money rather than investing in maintenance and upgrades needed to maintain the quality service standards of the past. As a result and in general, in many parts of the country, power outages that have nothing to do with storm damage are becoming more and more frequent.

So the other thing that forced the 2011 shut down of QFTR was the electricity fiasco. The electric company servicing QFTR headquarters has failed to provide reliable electrical service. There were dozens and dozens of power outages that had nothing to do with bad weather.

In general the US electrical system is old and fairly badly maintained, but even so, it is incredible how many power outages there actually have been at QFTR HQ from October 2009 through August 2011. To be exact, in these 22 months there were 32 power outages with at most five of these caused by bad weather. So there have been about 27 power outages in 22 months caused by lack of maintenance and lack of investment in new equipment. This is a rate of almost 15 power outages per year NOT caused by bad weather.

The number of outages was far in excess of anything I thought could happen. As a result, numerous power outages ended up causing a large scale data loss. Fortunately, heroic efforts prevented the loss of most of the most important data of all. It was a big disaster instead of a catastrophe. With a catastrophe, you are not talking about a temporary shut down but rather a long term shutdown (more than a year) and possibly a permanent shutdown.

Since I could not tolerate the actual data loss without an extraordinary response, QFTR had to be temporarily shut down (for about three months) so that full attention could be paid to the restoration of the lost data.

HOW EXACTLY DID THE POWER OUTAGES CAUSE THE LOSS OF THE DATA?
Hard drives (both internal and external) are subject to ruination when they are subjected to repeated power outages. But interestingly, some hard drives are much more resilient against power outages than others. Some hard drives keep on working more or less normally after 30, 40, even 50 power outages. Other hard drives will after several dozen outages develop so many "bad sectors" that the operating system will no longer be able to read the data, which means you have lost access to your data (which means you have lost the data even though it is technically still there).

YOU DIDN’T BACK UP YOUR DATA?
The majority of the data was backed up and not subject to loss. As for what was not backed up, I wasn't born yesterday, so I will be the first to admit that if I had had a strict, rigorous, and very expensive (in terms of time needed) backup system I could have dodged most or all of the data loss. I plead guilty to having had a relatively lazy data backup system. To oversimplify a little, I was procrastinating regarding backing up newer data. I was caught "holding the bag".

But the backup system I had was plenty good enough to deal with anything short of dozens and dozens of power outages and sudden, catastrophic hard drive failure. The latter is pretty rare (although I confess I don't know exactly how rare sudden, catastrophic hard drive failure is.) Before a hard drive fails completely mechanically, it will usually give off at least a few signs of distress, giving you time to get any newer data you don't yet have backed up backed up.

So bottom line, I was nailed by about the only thing that I could have been nailed by: numerous failures of the electric company to keep the power running 24/7. Historically, in most populated places in the US, the only time the power ever failed was during storms. Now, more and more the power is failing on beautiful sunny days. I paid the price for that failure of the US electric companies to invest enough to keep the power running 24/7 (except for storms).

So there you have it, a completely specific account of who and what forced QFTR to suspend for a few months in 2011.

THE UPS: WHAT CAN BROWN DO FOR YOU?
UPS usually refers to package delivery in those brown trucks, but it can also refer to an electronics product called uninterruptible power supply. These things feature a battery which keeps the power running to your computer equipment when the electric power fails. I use one of these now and will always be using one in the future. I should have had a UPS installed a long time ago; it probably would have prevented the data loss.

But again, for at least the 55 years 1950-2005 electric power was almost perfectly reliable in most of the US. How was I supposed to know that the age of reliable electric power in the US was and is coming to a close? Now I know and I am proceeding under the assumption of unreliable power.

Also, you generally can NOT buy a $125 to $175 UPS (which is what you need to spend) at Wal-Mart Stores. This means by definition that they are not popular products. This in turn means that most people are like I was until recently: completely in the dark about just what kind of threat the increasing failure of the US electric system is. Trust me, if you run any kind of “IT operations,” you probably need a UPS.

THE COMEBACK
Data recovery and data reconstruction have gone along very efficiently, more efficiently than expected. More than 2/3 of the lost data has already been reconstructed!

The temporary shutdown of QFTR may possibly have been dumb from the narrow short term perspective, but it was very smart thing to do medium and long term. The medium and long terms matter a lot more than the short term. Had the data recovery and the development of the data loss prevention system been strung out over many more months than it will be (so that the shutdown could be made very short) the total amount of time needed for it would have been far more. Concentrating fully on data recovery in the three months after the loss allowed for very high efficiency in reconstructing that lost data.

Having said that, as a result of the IRS, the electrical failures (and a few smaller factors that are not being mentioned here) QFTR is as of now way, way behind in its quota. I'll give you the exact number: QFTR is 181 hours behind right now. That's really bad but it's not as bad as it may look. As long as other projects are slashed and burned, and they are being slashed and burned, that 181 hours will be made up by about the end of 2012 if not sooner.

And yes, there is a production quota for QFTR. I realize that many people think quotas are stupid or that they don't work or whatever, but in fact they do work and in fact they work especially well when you have to deal with disasters. (But George Karl's monthly win quotas don't work so well, laugh out loud). Specifically, I know right now exactly how far behind I am for producing QFTR content. How the hell would I know this if I didn’t have a quota?

If I didn't have the quota system then most likely QFTR would have been permanently cheated.

As a result of knowing just how far behind I am, I can come up with a comeback plan that makes the best sense. I can gauge what other projects need to be cut back, suspended, or permanently eliminated.

OTHER PROJECTS GET SLASHED AND BURNED TO CLEAR THE WAY FOR QFTR
And understand this, I am 100% committed to keeping QFTR at the top of the Internet production heap, meaning that other Internet projects are being cut back, suspended indefinitely, and permanently terminated so that the path is clear for QFTR to get the resources it needs for a complete recovery. In other words, I will and I am slashing everything I have to slash and burn so as to make absolutely certain that I will be able to close the QFTR quota deficit in months rather than years. I don't have an exact recovery schedule as of yet, but I fully expect that I will be able to have QFTR completely recovered by about the end of 2012.

What that means is that during late 2011 and in 2012, QFTR production will be in overdrive; it will appear to be a project even bigger than it actually is. In turn, this means that I will have time to do things in 2012 that normally I would not have. In turn, this means that yours truly will be reporting on the lockout more extensively than I would have had the shutdown not happened. I mean, I would have been forced to report on it in any event, but the way the production parameters will play out will mean that I will be reporting on it more extensively than I would have.

SO WHEN IS THE SHUTDOWN GOING TO FREAKING END ALREADY???
And when is the freaking NBA lockout going to end already? I'm not sure about the lockout, and even more scandalously, I'm not sure at this moment exactly when the QFTR shutdown is going to freaking end. The data loss has been largely reversed, but now a new, far more expensive (in terms of time) data loss prevention system needs to be fully installed and implemented. At this moment the new data protection system itself is mostly completed. If it were just that, QFTR would be back today. But the implementation of the system (which comes with a really huge time price tag) is not close to being done yet.

So right now there is a raging debate about whether the data loss prevention system needs to be 100% completed and mostly implemented before QFTR comes back online, or whether things will work out alright if QFTR comes back into active production while the data loss prevention system work is done. A decision on that is expected by the end of September. Depending on exactly what is decided, QFTR will come back to full life sometime between September 24 and November 1, 2011. It's more likely that it will be earlier in that time frame than later.

To make sure there is no misunderstanding: it doesn’t matter what happens with the NBA lockout. Even in the worse case scenario, where the entire freaking season is cancelled (but trust me, that almost certainly is not going to happen) QFTR will come back to more than full production. Even if there is no season at all QFTR will still have more stuff it would like to do than it has time for. Regardless of what exactly is going down with the NBA, QFTR always has a long list of projects we want to do, the majority of which we don't have any time for.

As with previous shutdowns, when QFTR returns it will be bigger and better than ever before.

PS: FOOTBALL IS HERE
I can't resist watching some football today even though they still have their asinine pass catch rule in effect (that a catch is a catch only if the style of the catch is alright) Wrong. A catch is a catch even if a little bobbling of the ball is needed to complete the catch. Ugly catches are still catches. The receiver should not have to be close to perfect. If he has substantial control and possession than it is a catch. Style points should not count.