Valleywag: Laughing Squid

Valley denizens descend on Black Rock City

Jackson West — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:00:00 PDT

It's time for the annual bacchanal of burning fossil fuel and using drugs known as Burning Man. According to a tipster, "Google has a total of five big-rig hospitality trucks camped out at Burning Man for the Google elite and some other Valley bigwigs." Hope they stocked up on water, condoms and 2C-B! For those of you who would prefer to stay home and relish the widespread availability of parking, Scott Beale has assembled a handy guide to experiencing the scene on the playa without getting any sand somewhere uncomfortable. [Laughing Squid] (Photo by Dana Robinson)

Frank Chu at Laughing Squid's Lucky 13 party

Jackson West — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:00:00 PDT

Ubiquitous San Francisco icon Frank Chu cages a smoke from a fellow party-goer at last weekend's 13th anniversary party for artsy ISP Laughing Squid. Can you suggest a more kryxocryogenical caption? Do so in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Friday's winner: groslac for "Google to acquire invisible hand of markets." (Photo by Andrew Mager)

While now able to afford real women engineers, Google engineers are still embarrassed by their inflatable booth

Owen Thomas — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:00:00 PDT

Laughing Squid photographer Scott Beale, shooting pictures at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, was rebuffed by marketers staffing the Google booth. Company policy, they said, forbade photography of the booth. Beale complained on Twitter, and word rapidly issued from the Googleplex: It was actually okay, they said, to publicize Google's attempt at gathering publicity. Can you suggest a better headline? Leave it in the comments. (Yesterday's drew no deserving suggestions.) (Photo by viss)

Laughing and leaving

Megan McCarthy — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:13:47 PST

Laugh with a squid, say goodbye to a Yahoo, and relax with a flick, all in this weekend's Valleywag Calendar.

Andy Baio, creator of Yahoo-owned social planning network Upcoming, is hosting a goodbye party for himself for his last day on the job. At the Latin American Club on 22nd St. [Upcoming]
Laughing Squid holds a last-minute 12th anniversary party at Varnish in SoMa tonight at 7. [Laughing Squid]
Sunday night, show up at the Dark Room theater on Mission Street for one of their Bad Movie Nights. The flick this week is the hacker classic War Games. Would you like to play thermonuclear war? [Upcoming]

(Photo by Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Rackspace customers apologize for the downtime

Jordan Golson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:59:03 PST

There are a lot of posts popping up from various Rackspace customers apologizing to their customers and readers for the Web host's downtime caused by an errant truck. Here is a selection:

37signals

Will be using this situation as both a wake-up call and a learning experience. While our systems are engineered to chug through major failure, this "perfect storm" chain of events beat both our set-up and our data center's sophisticated back-up systems. We will work hard to further diversify our systems in order to make an future downtime event like this even more rare.

Threadless

As you noticed Threadless took a little nap this evening. Apparently a truck jumped a railing and attacked our data center. I think their may have even been an explosion. I hope so.

Laughing Squid

This is the first time we have had power outage like this in the 9 years that we have been in hosting (8 of which at Rackspace).

And here's Rackspace's public response:
Rackspace

*crickets*

Truck driver in Texas kills all the websites you really use

Jordan Golson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:12:24 PST

Remember the power mishap in July that brought down 365 Main, the San Francisco datacenter? A similar incident took place today at the Dallas datacenter of Rackspace, a San Antonio, Texas-based firm which serves several local Web outfits. Unlike the July outage, which killed all the websites we waste time with — LiveJournal, Craigslist, and so on — this one took out some sites which really mattered. Laughing Squid, Scott Beale's popular Web-hosting company, went down, taking a long list of customers with it, and 37signals, the maker of Web-based software, went out — a serious matter, since 37signals actually charges for using its software. So what exactly happened at Rackspace?

Like 365 Main, Rackspace was hit by a utility power outage on Sunday. Unlike 365 Main, Rackspace saw its generators kick in, and all was well. This evening, however, a truck drove into a power transformer, causing it to explode. Rackspace techs described this in an email to customers, with admirable sangfroid, as leading to "additional power issues." Further word from Rackspace is that the chillers that keep the servers cool lost power when the transformer blew. An unknown number of servers were taken offline to prevent damage from excessive heat. Currently, the chillers are back online and Rackspace techs are in the process of bringing all the affected customers back online.

Interestingly, as Scott Beale of Laughing Squid points out, "Rackspace does not have a status page or blog." Beale, who's using a status blog to keep his customers informed, later noted that Rackspace does have a "customer portal" — I guess that counts as a blog — which they eventually updated late tonight.

Update 7:54pm: Laughing Squid is back online once again. So is 37signals.

Followup:

An East Coast hustler tries to cheat a fundraiser

Owen Thomas — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 15:25:40 PDT

Julia Allison, the Star editor-at-large whose Diane von Furstenberg dress made a chesty, low-cut appearance at Friday's TechCrunch9 party, where she was hunting for geek boyfriend/sysadmins, also turned up at Saturday's Laughing Squid "Paradise Lost" event. But apparently no one had told her anything about the event, held in San Francisco's down-and-out Bayview neighborhood — like the fact that it was a community-arts fundraiser. Here's what happened when the New York slickster tried to swan her way through the door without paying.

An eyewitness report from Lori at the party gate, which Allison so inelegantly tried to crash:

I was heading up the door at the Laughing Squid "Paradise Lost" party when in breezed Julia Allison and her entourage. She went right by the staff taking the measly $10 for entrance and when stopped and informed that she needed to pay, she responded "You've got to be kidding me" in a voice indicating that we were far beneath her. Evidently one of her handlers saw this and gave us a ten for her entrance.

She then swung her hair at us and started walking through. We stopped her again and told her that we needed to stamp her hand to which she responded "I don't get my hand stamped". We told her that she needed a stamp for entry so she gave a very limp hand to the door person and said, "I only want a little bit of stamp right here" and showed him where and how to apply.

Bitch.

Sounds like Allison is fitting right in and making lots of friends on her swing through Cali! Hope you have a super fun time, Julia! (Photo from Allison's blog, where she misidentifies the Laughing Squid event as a TechCrunch party)

Web Infinity Plus One SloshCon: Thanks, sponsors!

Nick Douglas — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 16:21:30 PDT

Are you coming to this Thursday's Web Infinity Plus One SloshCon? Of course you are! It's free and there's an open bar!

Check out who's coming — Canadian Flockstar Will Pate, Digg hottie Kevin Rose, media maven Irina Slutsky of GETV, and so many more! Sign up or just stumble in!

And thanks to the $100 sloshcon sponsors — which now include WordPress.com owner Automattic, Mena Trott of Six Apart, Gabriel Venture Partners, Digg, STIRR Network, and Laughing Squid. Silver $250 sponsors are Topix.net and Valleywag owner Gawker Media.

Booze! Shouting! TV coverage (no seriously)! Get ready to get drunk and argue about the Internet (and those damn humanity-killing robots) this Thursday night at San Francisco's House of Shields!

Web Infinity Plus One: The SloshCon [Upcoming]

Remainders: Win Maker Faire tickets from a squid

ndouglas — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 18:08:43 PDT

Are you going to eat all that? No? GoDaddy will take it, thanks. [Monkey Bites]
Bridge-selling for dummies, round one— [Newswire Today]
And round two. [Inc.]
Yahoo to go: Soon you can use Yahoo Instant Messenger anywhere — and message your three buddies who refuse to use AIM. [TechCrunch]
The Onion on iTunes: How is this even fiction? [Onion]
The Onion on MySpace: Too. Fucking. Funny. [Onion]
Local event lister Laughing Squid is giving away tickets to this weekend's DYI tech event, the Maker Faire. [Laughing Squid]