May the Fourth Be With You - Happy Star Wars Day
Posted by kerry-kitka Wednesday, May 4, 2011The Force, Hipster, KFK Star Wars Meme Planes Nerd Dance Moves Vader Obi Wan Stormtrooper Han Solo
Bibs we make no claims to being “cool” over here at HQ. We deal in bibliographies and spend most of our days thinking about the best ways to cite our favorite adventure novels - not doing awesome things like jumping out of planes or busting out some sweet dance moves.
Which means, if there’s one thing we know, it’s how to party like a nerd. So in recognition of today’s date, May the 4th, we join in the celebration of what just may be the Nerd Holy Grail - STAR WARS. And what’s better to nerds than Star Wars? Why, memes about Star Wars of course.
Hit the jump to see the top Star Wars memes and a special surprise.
Read MoreWhat a Cat-Tastrophe!
Posted by kerry-kitka Tuesday, May 3, 2011KFK Cats Kitty Cute Reckless Stuck Handful
Well Bibs we don’t have to tell you that kitties are curious. No, we’re sure you realize that at times they’re downright reckless in their investigative pursuits. Who can blame them though? They’re just so darn cute.
However, sometimes cats find that they’ve gone a bit too far. Whether it be leaving a dead bird on your dinner table, or ripping your leather sofa to shreds - kitty can be a handful. But nothing quite hits home for your feline friend as when he gets himself into a sticky situation.
After the jump find the top 10 pictures of cats stuck inside things.
Read MoreMinistry of Silly Hats
Posted by kerry-kitka Friday, April 29, 2011Cats Friday Voldemort silly
Bibs of the world rejoice! Not only is it Friday, but Prince William of The United Kingdom & Catherine Middleton were wed today. “Awww…” you might say. Because, as we all know, there’s nothing that makes our hearts melt like a fairy-tale wedding. Right? Well, except maybe cats.
But I think what we’re all forgetting is the real reason why the world has its eyes glued to their TVs and computer screens today. Hats. Ridiculously silly and luxuriously impractical hats. As the above pie chart empirically proves, studies show that royalty enjoys silly hats over all other luxuries. Think about it, who was conspicuously absent from the wedding today? That’s right: Voldemort. And who never wears a hat, much less a silly one at that? Voldemort. Coincidence? I think not.
Hit the jump to see the top silly hats at today’s royal affair
Read MoreMaybe Dogs Were (not) Meant to Have Shoes
Posted by kerry-kitka Thursday, April 28, 2011Boss Dogs Funny
Hey Bibs, so you’ve made it past the dreaded middle of the week doldrums called Wednesday and come out on the other side. Not lookin’ to shabby either, we might add. Well, not looking as good as Jack Nicholson, but hey, who can?
But if there’s one thing we know here at Bib HQ, it’s that you can always use more examples of dogs doing funny stuff to make you look and feel your best. Submitted for your entertainment: everybody knows that dogs don’t need shoes, but what this video presupposes is, maybe they do?
Read MoreNEW Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows II Trailer
Posted by emrybibEDH
While not all members of the Bib team are fans of the Harry Potter series, the nerdiest smartest and wisest of us are. That contingent is very much looking forward to the second installment of The Deathly Hallow series, and we thought we’d share the latest trailer with you. Enjoy!
EasyBib Deploys Updates and New Features
Posted by kerry-kitka Wednesday, April 27, 2011Woeful Wednesday got you down Bibs?
Don’t fret, your old pal EasyBib has some shiny new features to brighten your day and your academic lives ;)
To kick it off, we’ve now added a count to your bibliography lists so you can easily tell how many citations you have in each. This will be handy for those assignments requiring a certain number of citations. You know, that way you can agonize about how you only need 1. More. Source!
Next up, we’ve included a new APA Capitalization Warning on your list page when switching from other citation styles. It will remind all you Bibs to brush up on the rules before finalizing your bibliographies - ensuring that you don’t incur the wrath of APA Police.
Finally, for all our our International Bibs and those requiring other languages, we’ve included Google’s Translate widget at the bottom of our pages. We know you’ve just been itching to cite in Slovak.
New general updates include: improvements all around and bug fixes to coupon codes and the Notebook.
10 Pictures of Jack Nicholson Looking Like A Boss
Posted by emrybibEDH
In case the title left some room for confusion, we’d like to present, 10 pictures of Jack Nicholson doing stuff that only Jack Nicholson can do:
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Checkout 15 more pics of Jack being Jack, right here.
10 Everyday Things You Never Knew Had Names
Posted by emrybib Tuesday, April 26, 2011EDH
1. Tiitle
The dot over an ‘i’ or ‘j.’
2. Lunule
The white, crescent shaped part at the top of a nail.
3. Crepuscular Rays
Rays of sunlight coming from a certain point in the sky. Also known as “God’s rays.”
4. Ferrule
The metal part on a pencil.
5. Arms Akimbo
Exactly what it looks like. Hands on your hips.
6. Brannock Device
What is used to measure your feet at the shoe store.
7. Paresthesia
The pins and needles feeling you get when part of your body falls asleep. Bonus! This is known as obdormition.
8. Phosphenes
The lights you see when you close your eyes and press your hands to them.
9. Wamble
Stomach rumblings.
10. Dysania
The state of finding it hard to get out of the bed in the morning.
Checkout 15 more examples @ Buzzfeed.com
The Top Ten Least Green States
Posted by emrybib Monday, April 25, 2011EDH
Did your state make the list? How do you feel about the “Go Green” initiative? Has massive celebrity involvement had any effect on your awareness? Hit the comments and let us know.
10. Illinois
9. Missouri
8. Kentucky
7. Texas
6. Pennsylvania
5. New Jersey
4. Louisiana
3. West Virginia
2. Indiana
1. Ohio
For more information on the states on this list, please checkout our source.
EasyBib Downtime [Resolved]
Posted by dsomashekar Thursday, April 21, 2011UPDATE STATUS [Resolved]
2:20 pm UPDATE: EasyBib’s main website is back online as of 2:20pm EDT. However, citations and lists still do not load.
2:36 pm UPDATE: We’re still bringing the citation data back online. You can format new citations, but currently cannot retrieve existing ones or stored lists. We will update this post as we progress further.
3:55 pm UPDATE: We are still working to restore saved citations (all citations are safe; we are just trying to get our servers that hold the data back online).
4:45 pm UPDATE: We are still working to restore saved citations.
1:22AM 4/22/11 UPDATE: citations are still not restored, but our hoster is working on bringing them up. We know that this has been an awful day for our users, and we recognize that many, many of you have projects, dissertations, and more stored on our systems that you have been unable to retrieve. We’re not proud of it, and we hope by tomorrow morning we’ll be back in action. We’ll update you as soon as we can on as we move things forward. This isn’t an abnegation of responsibility; we’re working 100% to get your data back online. Thank you for your patience.
11:22AM 4/22/11 UPDATE: You can now create and save new citations and projects. Additionally, projects made BEFORE November 2010 are also available. Projects made after November 2010 up to now are still being brought online. ETA will be today. However, if you have an emergency bibliography to create, we recommend you create a new project to re-enter your citations. For premium users, the Notebook is still inaccessible.
4:35PM 4/22/11 RESOLUTION: We’re happy to report we’re back online with all citation, notebook, and project data. Thank you for your patience. We apologize to the many, many students we’ve let down in the middle of dissertations and midterms; a whole scale meltdown of Amazon Web Services has never really happened. Now that we know we should expect the worst, we will prepare for it in the future.
- Note: for the curious, this is a partial list of all sites affected by this outage, in addition to EasyBib: http://ec2disabled.com/
- Users interested in the technical reasons for failure can check out the posts on the AWS status page (click More in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia) row): http://status.aws.amazon.com
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Hey everyone,
As you’re aware, EasyBib is currently down. Our hosting provider, Amazon Web Services, had issues starting at 3AM EDT this morning.
Here is their status. We are working to get our site back up and running despite the issues they are continuing to experience:
Via http://status.aws.amazon.com/ :
- 1:41 AM PDT We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.
- 2:18 AM PDT We can confirm connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances and increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Increased error rates are affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We continue to work towards resolution.
- 2:49 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances, increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region, and increased error rates affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We are also experiencing delayed launches for EBS backed EC2 instances in affected availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. We continue to work towards resolution.
- 3:20 AM PDT Delayed EC2 instance launches and EBS API error rates are recovering. We’re continuing to work towards full resolution.
- 4:09 AM PDT EBS volume latency and API errors have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We are continuing to work to resolve the issues in the second impacted Availability Zone. The errors, which started at 12:55AM PDT, began recovering at 2:55am PDT
- 5:02 AM PDT Latency has recovered for a portion of the impacted EBS volumes. We are continuing to work to resolve the remaining issues with EBS volume latency and error rates in a single Availability Zone.
- 6:09 AM PDT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.
- 6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.
- 7:40 AM PDT In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate. This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region.8:54 AM PDT We’d like to provide additional color on what were working on right now (please note that we always know more and understand issues better after we fully recover and dive deep into the post mortem). A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1. This re-mirroring created a shortage of capacity in one of the US-EAST-1 Availability Zones, which impacted new EBS volume creation as well as the pace with which we could re-mirror and recover affected EBS volumes. Additionally, one of our internal control planes for EBS has become inundated such that it’s difficult to create new EBS volumes and EBS backed instances. We are working as quickly as possible to add capacity to that one Availability Zone to speed up the re-mirroring, and working to restore the control plane issue. We’re starting to see progress on these efforts, but are not there yet. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.
- 10:26 AM PDT We have made significant progress in stabilizing the affected EBS control plane service. EC2 API calls that do not involve EBS resources in the affected Availability Zone are now seeing significantly reduced failures and latency and are continuing to recover. We have also brought additional capacity online in the affected Availability Zone and stuck EBS volumes (those that were being remirrored) are beginning to recover. We cannot yet estimate when these volumes will be completely recovered, but we will provide an estimate as soon as we have sufficient data to estimate the recovery. We have all available resources working to restore full service functionality as soon as possible. We will continue to provide updates when we have them.
- 11:09 AM PDT A number of people have asked us for an ETA on when we’ll be fully recovered. We deeply understand why this is important and promise to share this information as soon as we have an estimate that we believe is close to accurate. Our high-level ballpark right now is that the ETA is a few hours. We can assure you that all-hands are on deck to recover as quickly as possible. We will update the community as we have more information.
- Later status updates can be found at http://status.aws.amazon.com
