AWS went down, chaos followed. We’ve got the stories, the scars, and the takeaway.
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This is The Launch, Episode 38 for October 21st, 2025. Twenty five. I don't know. Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, we greet you all a good morning, a good evening, or whenever your timeline may fall. Time-appropriate greetings, indeed, to one and all. This is The Launch, and my name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hello, Andrews. Lots to get into this week. Thanks, Amazon. But before we do, a few things for everybody to know about. We'd love it if you gave us a call. You can call us during the show or after the fact and leave a voicemail. That number is 774-462-5667. That's in the plus one country code.
That's 774-462-5667 We are also live on a Tuesday 11.30 a.m. Pacific 2.30 p.m. Eastern 7.30 p.m. UTC at jblive.tv Or in your podcasting 2.0 app of choice Then we're at Wednesday mornings for your downloads And I invite you then, to give us a call or send us a boost That way the next episode just has something to feed into It's a cycle of life, The cycle of life, Andrews. All right, so how was your week? Did the AWS outage that everybody seems to be talking about bite you at all? It did. It did, yeah. So I woke up, and I typically scroll Facebook, and I saw it. And I thought, oh, right?
And I thought, it was like already four or six hours old, these posts that I saw, and I thought, oh, they got it. Like, I trained for my CCP, and so I have a basic understanding. I did not complete that certification. I went with Azure, the AZ-900. Which was up. Yeah, yes. But I thought, I wonder what today's going to look like. So I got to my desk to work, and I had a message from my boss, and he's like, check out this waterfall chart. This is really cool. We need to include this regularly. And I thought, how am I going to make this waterfall chart?
And basically it's we got this much funding, and then this much funding, and then this much funding, and it's going up in a bar chart or a column chart. And then we spent this much and this much and this much. And so it basically creates a parabola. But the columns are like only existing where the previous column left off. Right. Okay. So it raises and lowers. And I thought, how can I do this in Smartsheet? And so I opened Smartsheet to start working with my data and it would not load. Oh. So I restarted Firefox. Sure.
So I'm like, Firefox, why are you doing me like this? Right. It wasn't Firefox. Nope. And so then I thought, shoot, I brought up DownDetector. Actually, I did Down for Everyone or Just Me. And it said it was just me. Right? So I was like, awesome. But then I went to Down Detector because I'm like, there's no way. So Slack and Smartsheet. And I thought, I don't think I can work. What can I even do? Right? So I started doing some things around the house. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, I need to reorder something on Amazon. So I opened Amazon and went to my order history.
And I got the puppy dog, the sad puppy dog. Right? and then I was like oh it's garbage day did you know I just heard the garbage truck is it at the end of my driveway pulled up ring, I couldn't load the down-the-driveway camera. So I'm like, oh, my gosh. Now, the thing is, is I didn't have, like, when Facebook went down a couple years ago, like, I couldn't function. It was so weird. Kind of embarrassing to admit. This did not faze me. Like, I was, like, grateful to not be able to work. I mean, it was. You know what you mean? It's like, well, if I can't, there's nothing I can do. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But so then later in the day, you know, I keep checking back at work and Smartsheet still isn't loading.
And I'm definitely not going to mess with financial data. Did you try a Zoom call at all? Because I heard Zoom was having issues too. I had one meeting yesterday from 10 to 10.30, no issues. No issues. Yeah. And then my game that I play, also no issues. So that was cool. They must self-host. Well, they did give us gifts today because some people weren't able to access their website yesterday. So they were impacted. It just didn't impact me. but here's the thing last week we talked about Amazon Prime right and I was delaying signing up for Amazon Prime, I am the dumbass that signed up for Amazon Prime yesterday.
Really? Yeah. And it did not implement Prime. Oh, my God. What are the chances? I know. After I signed up, I was like, what was I thinking? Like, am I going to be a glitch account? Like, is this going to be? Yeah, you're a glitch account now. Like, it was so stupid. I just need to order some green pants so that Abby can be 067 from Squid Games for Halloween and have it here before Friday when you pick up the kids. but it was telling me Sunday this is yesterday it was telling me a full week and I'm like not only is it too late but that is not prime that is not even close to prime and so I kept like I thought oh maybe I need to take these out of my cart you know and just do a variety of different things but nothing did it except adding a second pair of pants, somehow it could get here Wednesday. Maybe it's like.
You got to a certain cost threshold. Yeah only for that item the three other items in my in my cart either took longer or well now what. Are you gonna you have to contact support. It resolved by late last night and i was able to place to order the pants will be there friday uh hopefully before uh the football game ends and they can go with yeah it was so stupid i don't know what i was thinking but it is just $14.99 for the first year for a new sign up. Oh yeah. That's worth it. Yeah. And then 140 after that. That's such a huge Delta though.
I know. Yeah. It's a 92% savings and you can cancel it, you know, if you, if you remember, but yeah, why would you? All right. Well, I take you back in time to like Sunday evening, Monday morning. 5.30. We begin with breaking news this half hour. We're following many websites and services are offline this morning following a major outage. Yeah, the issue stems with Amazon Web Services, or AWS. The major cloud computing services went offline early this morning, which is creating so many problems for thousands of websites, retailers, gaming across the country.
Too big. Let's check in with KPRC2 News reporter Brittany Jeffers, who is monitoring the situation, and we'll let you know how this could impact you. My story is sort of like it took us too long to figure out what's going on kind of thing. They should have failovers. Well, they do, but then certain components don't. So like they have multiple data centers, but then, well, I'll get into that. Yeah, okay. So Sunday evening, I was doing this like, I'm not going to do any screens for a couple hours before bed. I'm just going to read and take it low key. So I wasn't paying attention to the internet at all.
And we self-host a ton of stuff. So Hadea was able to watch TV just fine. Oh, my gosh. Were you not able to turn the lights off? No, no. All that stuff hosted. So we didn't know. Like, yeah, all the home automation stuff works. But like Sunday evening, a little bit before bed, Hadiyah's like, you know, tomorrow I need to have a phone ready for a project she has at work in her clinic. And it's an iPhone. She got a new old iPhone 11. And she's like, I don't know how to set it up. I'm like, can we go through that? I'm like, yeah, okay. So we're going through the process of setting up an iPhone. And she has to create a new iCloud account for this phone and all that. And that worked.
But then we got to the iPhone itself. We got into the OS. And the App Store didn't work. And Notes didn't work. And some of the stuff in Settings didn't work. And the Music app didn't work. And we're like, oh, no, you got a bogus phone. Oh, yeah. It would look like that, wouldn't it? And we're like, because why else would this be happening? And we're like, well, maybe it's something wrong with our Internet. Maybe Apple's having an outage. Check again in the morning. And then, of course, when I checked again in the morning, I discovered that the rest of the world, which they already knew, we had a massive AWS outage.
And I'm calling it the day AWS stood still. Or perhaps the great 2025 outage of AWS. And I know some of our listeners no doubt got called into the office. It wasn't just a couple of hour thing like some are playing it off. Oh, no, and they claimed to have fixed it, but the trickle down. Like, it continued. Yeah, my work didn't even announce that we were impacted by it until 1.15. Yeah. I'm like, where have you been? Duh. The tricky thing is, like, even if you don't run on AWS directly, something else you might. It was a third party.
Yep. Yep, it was one of our third party that used AWS. They have, so this was the US East 1 data center that went down. And they do have multiple data centers, but if components to, like, maybe switch you over or some of the alerting or monitoring, if that depends on the data center that went down, you're screwed. And it can make your component just quit working. Like a lot of the Ethereum wallets went offline, which is super embarrassing. Signal went down, even though they didn't really report that they ran on AWS. But I thought this top comment on Hacker News hits it on the head. It says...
Interesting day. I've been on an incident bridge since, binge I think you meant, since 3 a.m. Our systems have mostly recovered now with a few back office stragglers still fighting for compute. The biggest miss on our side is that although we designed a multi-region capable application, we could not run the failover process because our security org migrated our identity center and only put us in US East 1, hard locking the entire company out of the AWS control plane. Oh my gosh. By the time we'd gotten root credentials out of the vault, things were already starting to come back up. Good reminder that you're only as strong as your weakest link.
Yeah, you know what else? So before I checked to see if the garbage had been picked up, and before I recognized that Ring was part of this, it kept telling me there was a person at the front door, and I would look, and it was me. And it was like five minutes later. Yeah, it was like a ghost image of you. So it was trying. Yeah, yeah. I thought this was pretty good. Brian Webster on Mastodon said, It was picture day at my daughter's school today. We got a text from the school saying Picture Day has been postponed due to the Amazon Web Services outage.
Wow. Yeah. Picture Day. I wonder, so they must take the pictures and immediately upload them to the cloud that's not there? Right? They must. Maybe for the pictures, for the parents to go pull them down later. Invisible cloud. Mm-hmm. Um, gig workers really got screwed by this outage big time. They couldn't make money. This baby is probably one of the bigger undercover aspects of this outage. At tech outages, they can actually pause daily life for delivery drivers like Brandon Hennis, who rely on apps like DoorDash and Amazon Flex. The outage meant losing hours of work and money.
Dash ain't free. Time's not free. Um, and this is a full-time job for me. I logged onto the DoorDash app. DoorDash would crash. It would kick me out the app. Oh, that would be so scary. Dennis has been door dashing for more than two years, but that came to a complete stop during yesterday's outage. He says not being able to deliver anything has put him out of a good chunk of cash. Also, like, imagine at first you're like, am I in trouble? Did my account get banned? Yeah, yeah, that would be definitely. So Wes said, any word on if Flock uses AWS, hashtag silver lining. Really?
I thought this one was almost a self-aware bear. A great tweet. Didn't quite get there. This guy, Gil Moremo, he tweeted that his bed overheated because AWS was down. Oh. But it's a good thing because it alerted him to the outage. I mean, I love the cope here. So here's the tweet. I want to specifically thank Vrsel Team for working around the clock to keep customers safe. In fact, I was sleeping. It was 2 a.m. ish. And I was alerted about the issue because my internet mattress, which I love, shout out to Aidsleep, was too warm, which led me to opening the app. And then he noticed the outage. So his mattress got too warm.
His mattress is connected to the internet. Yeah. Also in a follow-up tweet, somebody else posted that while they love the product, they checked their stats and their bed has sent 16 gigs worth of metrics back to eight sleep. So I don't know why it's got to send 16 gigs of metrics in a month. But be careful if you have that. I could not imagine that. So what broke? Well, so a problem in the EC2 network load balancer health monitor, which is a key subsystem, as you can imagine, caused a big time failure. It suggested perhaps an update.
ironically, it could have been an update pushed by a single person that could have taken all of this out because that triggered DNS resolution failures. Are they still employed? Good question. And then app endpoints for DynamoDB and SimpleQ service, Lambda, and others was offline. Then it spread. There was sort of a global ripple effect. There was over 4 million reports at Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Zoom, Roblox, Prime Video, etc.. Etc.. Etc., all impacted. Apparently Apple, too. uh aws is still digging into the exact trigger so. The iphone 11 is working just fine now.
Yeah yeah go figure yeah uh we will get a more uh more info in a full postmortem soon this does echo similar u.s east 1 dns issues in 2020 and 2021 so 8 a.m on october 20th we had initial reports, midday it was peak impact on october 20th according to their timeline 3 p.m on the 20th they begin announcing that they were trying to restore service. By the 21st, all services were reported as normal. Now, I think there's an interesting takeaway here that tells us quite a bit. And I find this to be semi-alarming. Amazon stock is up on this news.
Think about that. They took out the entire internet for a day. Yeah. Well, how many people signed up for Prime yesterday? It's me. I did that. You did it. No, to the wider world. That is interesting. It revealed how essential AWS is. Yeah. And that companies can't function, and how locked in they are. And only three companies really control what is considered the cloud, right? You have Amazon at 32% of the market, Microsoft at 23% of the market, and Google Cloud at 10% of the market. And AWS is why Amazon is in the Mag-7. That's the top seven stocks of the S&P 500. And Amazon also has, obviously, they're selling. They have a logistics network for delivery. and they have advertising, which is growing really fast.
And so when this outage occurred, the message that the market took away was that Amazon's too important and that you should buy some. Yeah. Jeez. And like, I think they're right. I don't think there's walking this back anytime soon. You did see some people take their victory laps that their infrastructure was still online. Or, yeah, this is why we switched to self-hosting. There were a few people out there having their moment. And I was kind of in that group, too. I wasn't really too impacted outside of that iPhone 11. However, there's no walking this back, at least not for a decade.
So does Facebook not use AWS services, or did they have an easy failover? I think they have their own data centers, sort of like Google. Yeah, okay. So a lot of the big ones have their own. Yeah. Yeah, man, what crazy outage. And like I said, send us a message. Let me know how you are impacted by it because I just think just about everybody. Even if you're a big self-hoster, you were touched by this. And even though Amazon offers multiple regions and best practices and yada, yada, yada, all say multi-region, et cetera, et cetera, that kind of software is extremely hard to build. And any weak piece in there messes it up.
Not to mention SLAs. Oh, yeah. Amazon's going to be issuing a lot of credits. Yeah. A lot of credits. All right, this week I'm playing one of my favorites. It's Ollie, and this is Burning Room. If you boost in while the song plays, 95% of the sats go to Ollie. We got a nice little handful of voicemails this week, and we're starting to get a pattern of some regulars that call in, and that's always nice to check in. It's like hearing from old friends. And Mark from Michigan is our first caller this week. Oh. If I hear it, Mark, I'll let you know. You know, Labor Day is not a bad time to be here. A little busy. Not a bad time.
You know, you could do the... If you've never been to Seattle, it's fun to do the public market. the Space Needle. And the underground Seattle. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if it's warm. Underground Seattle can be a nice treat. The nice thing about this is personally my opinion about the Pacific Northwest is you have a really high success rate when it comes to restaurants. There are a couple of stinkers, but it's not like other places in the country where you can actually go and it's an awful restaurant and the food is terrible. Our average food is really good. And then of course our seafood Food is fantastic.
Mark, I'd like to know, why do you live so far out? What's out there? Is it a cabin? Is it a piece of property? Is it a habit? Why so far out? Do you not like living next to people? Yeah. All right. Well, look at this. Rastacastavara is back. It's been a little bit since we've heard from him. Ooh. Whoa. Oh. Yep. Hmm. Just get a battery. he calls back But I wanted to comment on the – he does. You know, I wonder if the rush for AI integration in places like medical is because what they're essentially hoping for on the other end is the ability to do a massive staff reduction, an efficiency gain.
I mean, right? That is what it seems like. Yeah. That's why you would – and it's maybe in that particular field they feel like that's an area. Yeah. Too many button pushers? Or costs or not enough people, you know, and so they can't get they can't hire enough. So there's, you know, well, we got nothing better. So we're gonna start using the machines. But Rasta calls back. Quick cold turkey. Well, they can't use Prime for that. Yeah. Right. Here's what happened to me is I was like, all right, I'm going to do the brick and mortar thing and I'm going to go there and we're just going to buy it locally and it's fine and I'll get it right away. So it'll be great.
And I go to the auto parts store and you know what they tell me every effing time. Oh, we don't carry that, but we could order it for you. We can get here in a couple of days or maybe tomorrow. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, so can I, buddy. It's called Amazon. Like I came to you because I was hoping you had it right now. All right. Another example. and like I have I have a hundred of these but uh the coldest slap in the face I got recently when. It comes to brick and mortar retail stores is I went to Best Buy and I realized they don't actually want you shopping Best Buy doesn't want you shopping at Best Buy they want you to place your order in the app ahead of time and then show up and pick it up and so like they're taking stuff off the shelves they're not they're not putting as much effort into the presentation they're they're clearly funneling all of the traffic for that type and then like if you happen to just be some weirdo retail shopper.
You can also get in line with the people that use the app. That's where we're at now. Yeah. Two things. Costco, not so bad. One, O'Reilly's has hub stores. And O'Reilly's is an auto parts store. They have hub stores and they have a crew of drivers that every day do the different routes in the areas. Yeah, they can get it usually within a day. Well, so each time they do their routes, It's like four times a day. And so they have a system in place to get parts a lot faster. I guess it's because I'm a fancy boy with a VW and a Volvo, and it's not like a Ford or a GM. I guess.
Although we go in with Brent's van, which is a quintessential Dodge platform that went from the 70s to the late 90s, and it was ubiquitous. And they don't have parts for it. Yeah. Oh, you know, it's just... But yeah, O'Reilly's has got a good network. So does Advanced. They have good parts networks. But they're just not super consistent about what they stock. And it's just all retail. $700 now. Okay, so SideQuest. Best Buy was rough. Panda Express opened in Lake Stevens. Oh, yeah? Yeah. And I don't recall ever having had Panda Express. I know there's one right here by the studio. I got horrible food problems.
Right? Or get them repaired. Wow. Rough. Okay. Well, so, okay. Okay, similar to Chick-fil-A on 88th or 116th. I can never remember which one. Wherever Chick-fil-A is nearby, they didn't design it right. They ended up shutting down for two or three weeks and redesigning. Really? Because their parking lot was horrible. Their drive-thru was horrible. Everything was horrible. I'm talking about blowing it. Yeah, yeah. And the Chick-fil-A is coming in right across from Panda Express in Lake Seaman. So I'm really excited about that. That's a good fight.
And hopefully they do it right in the first place. But what Panda did, and they seem to have thought a little bit better about it, but I went last week. I think it was one day after they opened, right? So still everybody's really excited. But they have two lines. They have the line for people that are stupid and just walk in. And then they have a line for mobile and pickup. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep. And I thought, that's really smart. And that way, you know, but the lines were, you know, 25 feet long. Both lines. It was crazy.
Jeez, really? Yeah. And the people in the kitchen, like, you can see them all there and cooking and restocking. There's at least 20 people working. It was crazy. And it was really good. That's what I said. I do. I really like Panda Express. It was really good. I'll tell you. I'll tell you what was great. First of all, get a Quiznos on the way out of Denver. Haven't had Quiznos in the hot minute. Chicken carbonara again. Do recommend. And then, on our last day on the road back, Wes and I picked up a little BK. Stopped by and got the King in one of their breakfast sandwiches that I haven't had in a long time. Got it our way.
What's our way? That's just their slogan. Oh, okay. I wasn't sure if I forgot. I still have only had Burger King. I can now count on two hands how many times I've had Burger King. Yeah, I've had that. Yeah. But it was fun. Props to Burger King. You know what? They're trying to compete. All right, a guy named Ryan called in. Yeah, I literally passed it a couple hours ago, so I don't even know what my score was. All I know is I passed, so I'm sure I'll get the badge and other things from AWS in a couple of days. So, yeah, I'll do that whole public celebration thing. But, yeah.
So, thank you very much. I wanted to share that with you guys. But, yeah, as far as the phone case is concerned, I'll just piggyback on – well, actually, I'll tell you my quick story. You wanted to know what the odd disasters were. I don't know how odd it is, but it's odd for us. My wife, not once but twice, left it on the top of the car. And we found out, you know, a mile or so down the road, go back, big old crack right through the middle of it. And it had, you know, so that's as disastrous as it got for us. So, yeah. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh. Right. I'm kidding. Well, yeah, we'll see what the audience comes up with throughout the week about their disaster stories and maybe what they've done to recover. He has another voicemail, but before we play it. That is so tricky with the water pump, right? Because technically they can replace the water pump and claim job done. And I think the key thing to do in these situations is say, why do you believe the water pump failed? What is your best diagnostic reason for why the water pump failed? Because then that might lead to a conversation that gets to, should we also be flushing this?
Because the pump can fail, and if the pump is struggling, if there was a blockage, you can imagine a lot of pressure and strain on those hoses built up all the time. And then you get the new pump in there, and it's back to full power. And it probably very quickly ruptured that hose. Now, as a shop, I think they should own that. But technically, they did the job and replaced the water pump. And I would imagine those hoses are pretty hard to get to. Which is probably why they didn't replace them to begin with. But if you got to the root of why it failed in the conversation.
That's just such a sucky situation. Any shredded cheese that you like can be really cool. Good job sticking with it. Nine days. Thanks so much for the show. Dog with a bone. All right, so it calls back. For this show, you really should consider a pick each week, a recipe pick. Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Hey guys, it's Faraday Fedora again. I have a bit of a problem with Crashmaster. We're there with the shepherd's pie. Shepherd's pie never has ground beef, it's ground lamb. Ground beef makes cottage pie, which there's nothing wrong with, just a bit of a formality there. And then for the mashed potatoes, for the love of God, never use a food processor or a blender.
Always hand mash, otherwise you're halfway to making bread. And then what I would recommend is throw in some roasted garlic into that when you're mashing it up. And then when you put it on top of the mix, do a little kind of scrape with a fork, making a bit of a lattice pattern and sprinkle that with a bit of paprika. I wonder, a guy named Ryan, did you grow up in a place where you can? And if you can. Drizzle a bit of butter on top of that when you bake it in the oven, it'll make it nice and nice and crispy. Or is it the opposite? Like, perhaps you and I were acclimated because we lived in areas where the power went out and the parents were used to it, so it was no big deal for our parents.
It was like, all right, get the lanterns out. And it was kind of an event. And so we just have associated those fond memories with it. But, yeah, if I were scared of all of that, I think I would just gear up, gear up on, like, the lanterns and the automatic lights and all of that. The backup batteries. Yeah. When the power goes out, it's daylight. That's how I would do it. Thank you, Guy. Your name is Ryan. Appreciate the calls. And we have, I think he said Iron Joe. I don't think it's Mark, but I think it's another caller from Michigan. Specifically about rats.
I've had a couple Raffa's pets. Names were Potter and Pepper. Pepper was white gray brown and Otter after Beatrice. They were hands down the best pets I have ever had. And I've had cats, dogs, just about every kind of hamster, fish, snake, turtle, anything you can think of. I've even had a gator and for the record I am Canadian living in Canada. you can train rats way better than dogs they are incredibly affectionate and despite their reputation they're also super clean animals you know obviously get a rat from a pet store I wonder if any. Of our local tire.
Shops the only two big downsides is they only live in a few years or. Would it be through insurance shortly. After our first rat and the back driver's side tire is down A massive, huge pile of nuts and dry food fell off from inside. I finally did put air in it last night. Mine's losing like eight a day. It's a massive pile, enough to pile up on it. That's insane. I know. It turned out that sometimes it treats you had been giving her over the years. I've gone to a Chevron and a Shell. Yeah, and it won't do it. I had to use Apple Cash.
I picked up, you can look at these, they're on Amazon. I picked up like a portable drill-style air pump. Yeah, I know, I need to. Yeah, somebody recommended that to me, and I'm like, I don't need it. So they have this kind of urge to chew on things. So you just give them lots of voice that you want. I don't want to deal with it, but that's great information. Thank you, everybody who called in. I also wanted to mention this incredibly amazing office. We put the phone number right there in our show notes. You don't even have to remember it. You can just look at the show notes and call in. Leave us a voicemail.
And all my self-hosted stuff. Like, this is seriously a huge, huge deal. This project might actually finally usher in the year of the Linux desktop. And PJ comes in as our baller booster this week with 22,222 sats. Welcome back, guys. We had many power outages from summer monsoons as a kid in Arizona. We would light candles and watch the clouds and lightning roll over. We'd enjoy the cool weather outside and count the seconds between lightning and thunder to see if it was coming or going. Oh, yeah. Okay, we definitely do that. Yeah, yeah.
You got it. If it's stormy. Sometimes there's, like, nothing going on and we've lost power. It's not as fun. Or just wind and rain. No lightning. Yeah, you know, in Arizona, too, and other places, when that comes in, the temperature just drops. You get a little relief. These days, I'd probably spend the entire time of the outage bringing up a power source just for it to come back in time by the time it's time done. Yeah, I know. Right? You get the bar and door fixed just as the horses come home. Just thinking about that. Thank you, PJ.
Thank you for being our baller booster. Appreciate that. Out there in the Pacific Northwest. Retro Gear is here with 3,000. Sacks. Interesting news on Flock. And he links us to an area, a town, I guess. Flock cameras to be paused within the next 24 hours. Eugene City. Good for them. She is working with police chief to pause activity on all flock cameras in the next 24 hours during a city council meeting on Monday. The decision comes after the city council unanimously voted to recommend the mandatory pause on the cameras during October 8th work session after months of public screening. Hey, Chris and Angie.
So is it a permanent decision? I think so. Yeah. Eugene residents took to public comment to express their dissatisfaction with the installation of the flock cameras. Urgent City Council to terminate the city's contract and lock safety. Well, how come we're not all doing that? Right? Everybody do it. Yeah, that seems like the way to go. Let me just make a small section for food. Right. Get out there and stir up some crap. Pabby's here with a row of ducks. Yeah, hopefully I am not too late for this. It was just the color line. I'm not sure if that's better.
Oh, right, for Lime. Right. It's just the color line, not the color line. You can't even remember the last power outage we had probably 10 plus years ago. My go-to now would be reading. The Kindle lasts for weeks. And there's a line integrated. Yes, nice. Reading is good to do during a power outage. Also, how many of us immediately go to the stupid little light on our phones in those moments too? Oh, yeah. The flashlight? Yeah. The torch, as they call it. It's Magnolia again. All right, here we go. Bit-ish comes in with 4,200 sats. The suggestions I made, I think it was the last episode, maybe the one before that.
Thanks for playing Mookie on the launch. Honored to be featured. I featured track again. You've played once before, and we'll keep coming. We'll keep on spinning. We love Mookie. Thank you for the boost. Nice to hear from you. That's fine. I'll just wait for it to renew. Hey, there's Turd Ferguson. He's here with 12,222. Sats. You get a free trial, and you never get to use it again. That's okay. I'll just switch. AWS might be down, but the boost still worked. Well, I've got a Google account. I'm walking to the other Google account. And I got permanently banned for trying to ban a vase. Magnolia Mayhem's here with 8,642 cents. I was sending my suggestion of Warp Criminal. That's pretty much it.
I don't think people realize or recognize the importance of what is being done here with boosting ads are more than just annoying blurb to be skipped. They're socially accepted propaganda. We've had this culture across media since the beginning, and we just accept that someone can waltz up to the show, slap down a checkbook and change the opinions of the windows of our change, the opinions of our windows to the world. Random new listener started. It wasn't OK in the 1920s with radio and it's not OK in the 2020s with podcasts. I just wanted to say that I've been using this end browser for a couple of eight months now.
And it has been pretty awesome. The only comments I have that you didn't mention. I agree. And, you know, each one of these ad deals is its own bespoke negotiations. You don't know what's gone into the deal. You just have to trust that the podcaster is negotiating in best faith. Or the content creator. You can split more than two. I've gone up to four. It's particularly pervasive on YouTube. The amount of free crap YouTubers get. It is hard. As somebody who's been doing this for a very long time, I realized very early on if I buy a laptop versus given a laptop, if I'm given a laptop, I was much more inclined to look over small things like maybe the screen didn't shut off when I closed the lid. Who cares? I got it for free.
But if I spent $2,000, that screen better effing turn off. Right. It's a mental shift. And this is so pervasive. You're really on to something here because it goes beyond just the fact that we waltz in and have propaganda and it's just, we normalized it, but to the point of it's so obscure and opaque behind the scenes as well. And the booths are the exact opposite of that. Everything's in the RSS feed. The spec is open. The lightning network is open. It's the exact 180. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate that, Magnolia. It's a good one. Also, thanks for hanging out in the quiet listening.
Okay, so we had three of you. Oh, that hurts right there. That hurts right there to even say it. We had three of you stream sats. What happened? Well, maybe AWS is still down. Can we blame that? No. I don't think we can blame that. Okay, so we had three of you stream sats, and collectively you stacked 2,565 sats. Well, thank you very much. I do appreciate that yeah it's not too bad I suppose that's pretty bad and then when you combine that with our boosts we stacked 55,073. Sets hey it's uh Magnolia Mayhem, I feel I feel really bad I was considering calling in over like three or four things and seeing you kind of pushing me over the edge I.
Think it's because we took the time off. I feel so bad because we took the time off. They'll come back, right? Once they see a couple episodes in the feed? They'll come back. Thank you, everybody who does support the show with a boost or a Jupiter Party membership. Or a voice me. Yeah. I really appreciate it. I import all my Firefox add-ons. It was a one-to-one thing. I just like... It lets you sign into your Firefox account. All right, so here is what is now actually being called. Quite literally, the heist of the century. The Louvre, the world's biggest museum, a symbol of France, now a crime scene.
On Sunday morning, in broad daylight, a gang of four professional thieves used this mechanical ladder to reach the first floor window of the Galleria d'Apollon. Who's actually really a crane. Huh. It's a crane ladder. So they took a truck with a crane ladder, backed it up to the museum, and then busted this thing up the side of the museum into one of the windows. Using battery-powered disc cutters, two of them broke into the gallery's most ornate rooms, housing France's royal jewels. Threatening security guards, they proceeded to smash display cases, stealing nine items, before trying to set fire to the ladder vehicle, then making their escape on scooters.
No one was injured in the robbery, with the museum being evacuated and closed for the rest of the day. The nine stolen items all date from France's 19th century royalty, and are encrusted with thousands of diamonds and other precious gemstones. They include a brooch that once belonged to Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III. And a pair of emerald earrings. Yes. Empress Eugenie's crown was found near the scene, apparently dropped by the thieves in their haste to get away. Yeah, they dropped one. Can you believe that? They don't know who it is. They're still searching for them. Oh, this is so crazy.
Will they ever recover these? I don't know, because there are so many small little jewels. I was looking into this, and what they will do is two things. They'll break them up into smaller pieces and sell those, which there's a big demand for precious metals and stuff. Or they wait for the insurance companies to capitulate, which seemingly always happens. And then the insurance companies will make a multi-million dollar, no questions answered offer. If somebody just returns these items, they'll get a million dollars. We won't ask any questions.
Right. And then they cash in that way. Wow. Crazy, huh? Crazy old school. And I guess they've had a whole rash of museum break-ins, but that one's like nothing else. Yeah, that is crazy. Yeah. So they didn't have, like, lasers? No, not like they do in the movies. Come on. They had some, like, bolt cutters they had to go through. But, yeah, they clearly had a plan. Yeah. But it wasn't that crazy of a plan. No. Risky. It probably just looked like construction, too. Yeah. Like, they probably, yeah, wow. All right. Now we've got to do this next thing. I'm very excited about this. Okay. Not quite what I've invasioned, but since I was a young lad, I have dreamed of a health sensor that I thought the technology would eventually be here for.
And once it arrived, it would give us a whole new level of insights into our day-to-day health. Oh, are you talking about AI solving cancer? Maybe. I mean, it might through this. I mean, once you get the data, you got to have the data first, Ang. So chime in when you've figured out what this product is. The Tricorder? Oh, wouldn't that be great? I would be so excited about that. No, no. Well, it's like a localized Tricorder. Okay. Can I look at your – Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. Introducing Dakota by Kohler Health. Tricoda.
A first-of-its-kind product that illuminates your path to better living. Dakota translates your body's signals into real-time insights. All right. Body signals. Helping you decode your body's cues. Focusing on pattern detection for... Okay, so body cues, pattern detection. Do you have a guess yet? No. No? Gut health and hydration. Dakota uses advanced spectroscopy sensors to seamlessly analyze what your body leaves behind. Its sleek, self-clamping design blends seamlessly into any bathroom. Oh, my God. While privacy... All right, what do you think it does?
Oh, my God. What do you think it does? Well, I see it's clipped on the side of the toilet here. It's a toilet sensor with a camera. Yeah, it makes me laugh so hard. This video goes into, which I'll link in the show notes. It's so dumb. It's so great. It lights the path. I'm like, oh, okay, it's emergency lights. It lights the path of what you leave behind. It senses what your body is feeling. The best part is the price. Wait till we get to the price. Kohler just dropped one of the most eyebrow-raising gadgets we've seen, the Dakota, a $599 camera that mounts onto your toilet bowl and snapshots what you flush.
The device attaches under the rim of the toilet, points down at the bowl, and uses imaging plus AI to analyze your waste for indicators of gut health, hydration, and even blood traces. It includes a fingerprint scanner so it knows who is on the throne. You'll need the hardware. $599, plus a subscription between $70 and $156 per month to get full diagnostics. Now, I think they've lowered the subscription prices. Okay. So it gets more expensive depending on, you know, what kind of insights you want from your poop. And if you want individual family poop analysis, So if you want whole house poop analysis, that costs more. But if you're a single household pooper, you get it for cheaper.
Well, without that fingerprint, it's like, okay, who pooped at 2 p.m.? Now you got a poop log. Kohler pre-orders begin now with shipments starting tomorrow, October 21. On the privacy front, Kohler insists the camera sees down into your toilet and nowhere else. It also claims data is encrypted end to end. This isn't just another smart bathroom gadget. It signals how far health tech is willing to go. The bathroom, the most private place in your home, is now a frontier for diagnostics. If the Dakota works as advertised, it could help detect medical issues early. But the fact it's a camera looking at your body's most intimate moments raises big privacy and ethical flags.
So when I was a young lad, I thought something like this would come along, but I didn't think it'd be a camera. I thought it'd just be like, you know, chemical sensors in the toilet. It would be like, hey, bro, you got too much S in your, you're in or whatever you've been partying a bit, but this they, so of course, and as you would expect, because of the type of image analysis it has to do, there's like an AI angle to all of this as well. So I don't know. The first features like remote fingerprint authentication and end to end encryption are designed to keep.
Oh, yeah. Dakota delivers personalized... That's the wild thing, too, is the screenshots of the app, the data is not very useful. It's just like you're doing okay hydration-wise. Good job. Like, it's not... Yeah. Like, it's not particularly useful. ...health scores to help build lasting, healthy habits. It's everything your body's been trying to tell you, Decoded. The future of health starts here with Dakota. What do you think? I don't know. I mean, you know, I was supposed to provide a sample to my doctor like sometime in the last year. And I decided I just didn't.
Yeah. Who wants to do that? I know. I guess what if you could, what if the doctor sent you home with one of these you clip on for like a weekend? Oh, well, no, it was just like a, it was a collection bag. No, I know. And a popsicle stick. What if instead, what if instead they could offer you take home, you know, the fecal scanner and it. I wouldn't trust that. Just taking a picture? I mean, picture says a thousand words, right? I don't know. Only a thousand. Can we take a moment for the poor souls that had to train this data system? They had to analyze a lot of data in order to build this. They were looking at pictures of poop for years.
Mm-hmm. Imagine. So what do you do for a living? Well, let me tell you, I'm working for this AI startup. Oh, how exciting. No. Think about that for a moment. All right. Well, if you'd buy one of these, you got to boost in or call in and tell us why. What would you do with it? Okay. And what if it was $199 with local analysis? this? You know, okay. So I am taking iron pills right now because I'm iron deficient again. I'm taking six a day. My stool is definitely different now. Okay. You know? And I wonder if that would throw it off. Well, or tell you something's wrong. What if they could say, hey, what if they could really analyze and be like, maybe you should eat a little bit of this. Eat a little bit of this, add this to your diet.
Yeah. Well, I would have to say I'm allergic to that. Based on your poo, Based on your poo, we have determined. Oh, my gosh. All right. I think that's about as low as we can go. Yep. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to this week's episode of The Launch. Links to what we talked about at weeklylaunch.rocks. Remember, we want to hear your AWS outage stories, good or bad. And we'd love it if you joined us live next Tuesday. We could use a few more of the live vibe. So catch us in your podcast app or at jblive.tv on a Tuesday. We'll be out for a download on a Wednesday.
from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you right back here next week.
This is The Launch, Episode 38 for October 21st, 2025. Twenty five. I don't know. Streaming from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast, we greet you all a good morning, a good evening, or whenever your timeline may fall. Time-appropriate greetings, indeed, to one and all. This is The Launch, and my name is Chris. And I'm Angela. Hello, Andrews. Lots to get into this week. Thanks, Amazon. But before we do, a few things for everybody to know about. We'd love it if you gave us a call. You can call us during the show or after the fact and leave a voicemail. That number is 774-462-5667. That's in the plus one country code.
That's 774-462-5667 We are also live on a Tuesday 11.30 a.m. Pacific 2.30 p.m. Eastern 7.30 p.m. UTC at jblive.tv Or in your podcasting 2.0 app of choice Then we're at Wednesday mornings for your downloads And I invite you then, to give us a call or send us a boost That way the next episode just has something to feed into It's a cycle of life, The cycle of life, Andrews. All right, so how was your week? Did the AWS outage that everybody seems to be talking about bite you at all? It did. It did, yeah. So I woke up, and I typically scroll Facebook, and I saw it. And I thought, oh, right?
And I thought, it was like already four or six hours old, these posts that I saw, and I thought, oh, they got it. Like, I trained for my CCP, and so I have a basic understanding. I did not complete that certification. I went with Azure, the AZ-900. Which was up. Yeah, yes. But I thought, I wonder what today's going to look like. So I got to my desk to work, and I had a message from my boss, and he's like, check out this waterfall chart. This is really cool. We need to include this regularly. And I thought, how am I going to make this waterfall chart?
And basically it's we got this much funding, and then this much funding, and then this much funding, and it's going up in a bar chart or a column chart. And then we spent this much and this much and this much. And so it basically creates a parabola. But the columns are like only existing where the previous column left off. Right. Okay. So it raises and lowers. And I thought, how can I do this in Smartsheet? And so I opened Smartsheet to start working with my data and it would not load. Oh. So I restarted Firefox. Sure.
So I'm like, Firefox, why are you doing me like this? Right. It wasn't Firefox. Nope. And so then I thought, shoot, I brought up DownDetector. Actually, I did Down for Everyone or Just Me. And it said it was just me. Right? So I was like, awesome. But then I went to Down Detector because I'm like, there's no way. So Slack and Smartsheet. And I thought, I don't think I can work. What can I even do? Right? So I started doing some things around the house. And then I'm like, oh, yeah, I need to reorder something on Amazon. So I opened Amazon and went to my order history.
And I got the puppy dog, the sad puppy dog. Right? and then I was like oh it's garbage day did you know I just heard the garbage truck is it at the end of my driveway pulled up ring, I couldn't load the down-the-driveway camera. So I'm like, oh, my gosh. Now, the thing is, is I didn't have, like, when Facebook went down a couple years ago, like, I couldn't function. It was so weird. Kind of embarrassing to admit. This did not faze me. Like, I was, like, grateful to not be able to work. I mean, it was. You know what you mean? It's like, well, if I can't, there's nothing I can do. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But so then later in the day, you know, I keep checking back at work and Smartsheet still isn't loading.
And I'm definitely not going to mess with financial data. Did you try a Zoom call at all? Because I heard Zoom was having issues too. I had one meeting yesterday from 10 to 10.30, no issues. No issues. Yeah. And then my game that I play, also no issues. So that was cool. They must self-host. Well, they did give us gifts today because some people weren't able to access their website yesterday. So they were impacted. It just didn't impact me. but here's the thing last week we talked about Amazon Prime right and I was delaying signing up for Amazon Prime, I am the dumbass that signed up for Amazon Prime yesterday.
Really? Yeah. And it did not implement Prime. Oh, my God. What are the chances? I know. After I signed up, I was like, what was I thinking? Like, am I going to be a glitch account? Like, is this going to be? Yeah, you're a glitch account now. Like, it was so stupid. I just need to order some green pants so that Abby can be 067 from Squid Games for Halloween and have it here before Friday when you pick up the kids. but it was telling me Sunday this is yesterday it was telling me a full week and I'm like not only is it too late but that is not prime that is not even close to prime and so I kept like I thought oh maybe I need to take these out of my cart you know and just do a variety of different things but nothing did it except adding a second pair of pants, somehow it could get here Wednesday. Maybe it's like.
You got to a certain cost threshold. Yeah only for that item the three other items in my in my cart either took longer or well now what. Are you gonna you have to contact support. It resolved by late last night and i was able to place to order the pants will be there friday uh hopefully before uh the football game ends and they can go with yeah it was so stupid i don't know what i was thinking but it is just $14.99 for the first year for a new sign up. Oh yeah. That's worth it. Yeah. And then 140 after that. That's such a huge Delta though.
I know. Yeah. It's a 92% savings and you can cancel it, you know, if you, if you remember, but yeah, why would you? All right. Well, I take you back in time to like Sunday evening, Monday morning. 5.30. We begin with breaking news this half hour. We're following many websites and services are offline this morning following a major outage. Yeah, the issue stems with Amazon Web Services, or AWS. The major cloud computing services went offline early this morning, which is creating so many problems for thousands of websites, retailers, gaming across the country.
Too big. Let's check in with KPRC2 News reporter Brittany Jeffers, who is monitoring the situation, and we'll let you know how this could impact you. My story is sort of like it took us too long to figure out what's going on kind of thing. They should have failovers. Well, they do, but then certain components don't. So like they have multiple data centers, but then, well, I'll get into that. Yeah, okay. So Sunday evening, I was doing this like, I'm not going to do any screens for a couple hours before bed. I'm just going to read and take it low key. So I wasn't paying attention to the internet at all.
And we self-host a ton of stuff. So Hadea was able to watch TV just fine. Oh, my gosh. Were you not able to turn the lights off? No, no. All that stuff hosted. So we didn't know. Like, yeah, all the home automation stuff works. But like Sunday evening, a little bit before bed, Hadiyah's like, you know, tomorrow I need to have a phone ready for a project she has at work in her clinic. And it's an iPhone. She got a new old iPhone 11. And she's like, I don't know how to set it up. I'm like, can we go through that? I'm like, yeah, okay. So we're going through the process of setting up an iPhone. And she has to create a new iCloud account for this phone and all that. And that worked.
But then we got to the iPhone itself. We got into the OS. And the App Store didn't work. And Notes didn't work. And some of the stuff in Settings didn't work. And the Music app didn't work. And we're like, oh, no, you got a bogus phone. Oh, yeah. It would look like that, wouldn't it? And we're like, because why else would this be happening? And we're like, well, maybe it's something wrong with our Internet. Maybe Apple's having an outage. Check again in the morning. And then, of course, when I checked again in the morning, I discovered that the rest of the world, which they already knew, we had a massive AWS outage.
And I'm calling it the day AWS stood still. Or perhaps the great 2025 outage of AWS. And I know some of our listeners no doubt got called into the office. It wasn't just a couple of hour thing like some are playing it off. Oh, no, and they claimed to have fixed it, but the trickle down. Like, it continued. Yeah, my work didn't even announce that we were impacted by it until 1.15. Yeah. I'm like, where have you been? Duh. The tricky thing is, like, even if you don't run on AWS directly, something else you might. It was a third party.
Yep. Yep, it was one of our third party that used AWS. They have, so this was the US East 1 data center that went down. And they do have multiple data centers, but if components to, like, maybe switch you over or some of the alerting or monitoring, if that depends on the data center that went down, you're screwed. And it can make your component just quit working. Like a lot of the Ethereum wallets went offline, which is super embarrassing. Signal went down, even though they didn't really report that they ran on AWS. But I thought this top comment on Hacker News hits it on the head. It says...
Interesting day. I've been on an incident bridge since, binge I think you meant, since 3 a.m. Our systems have mostly recovered now with a few back office stragglers still fighting for compute. The biggest miss on our side is that although we designed a multi-region capable application, we could not run the failover process because our security org migrated our identity center and only put us in US East 1, hard locking the entire company out of the AWS control plane. Oh my gosh. By the time we'd gotten root credentials out of the vault, things were already starting to come back up. Good reminder that you're only as strong as your weakest link.
Yeah, you know what else? So before I checked to see if the garbage had been picked up, and before I recognized that Ring was part of this, it kept telling me there was a person at the front door, and I would look, and it was me. And it was like five minutes later. Yeah, it was like a ghost image of you. So it was trying. Yeah, yeah. I thought this was pretty good. Brian Webster on Mastodon said, It was picture day at my daughter's school today. We got a text from the school saying Picture Day has been postponed due to the Amazon Web Services outage.
Wow. Yeah. Picture Day. I wonder, so they must take the pictures and immediately upload them to the cloud that's not there? Right? They must. Maybe for the pictures, for the parents to go pull them down later. Invisible cloud. Mm-hmm. Um, gig workers really got screwed by this outage big time. They couldn't make money. This baby is probably one of the bigger undercover aspects of this outage. At tech outages, they can actually pause daily life for delivery drivers like Brandon Hennis, who rely on apps like DoorDash and Amazon Flex. The outage meant losing hours of work and money.
Dash ain't free. Time's not free. Um, and this is a full-time job for me. I logged onto the DoorDash app. DoorDash would crash. It would kick me out the app. Oh, that would be so scary. Dennis has been door dashing for more than two years, but that came to a complete stop during yesterday's outage. He says not being able to deliver anything has put him out of a good chunk of cash. Also, like, imagine at first you're like, am I in trouble? Did my account get banned? Yeah, yeah, that would be definitely. So Wes said, any word on if Flock uses AWS, hashtag silver lining. Really?
I thought this one was almost a self-aware bear. A great tweet. Didn't quite get there. This guy, Gil Moremo, he tweeted that his bed overheated because AWS was down. Oh. But it's a good thing because it alerted him to the outage. I mean, I love the cope here. So here's the tweet. I want to specifically thank Vrsel Team for working around the clock to keep customers safe. In fact, I was sleeping. It was 2 a.m. ish. And I was alerted about the issue because my internet mattress, which I love, shout out to Aidsleep, was too warm, which led me to opening the app. And then he noticed the outage. So his mattress got too warm.
His mattress is connected to the internet. Yeah. Also in a follow-up tweet, somebody else posted that while they love the product, they checked their stats and their bed has sent 16 gigs worth of metrics back to eight sleep. So I don't know why it's got to send 16 gigs of metrics in a month. But be careful if you have that. I could not imagine that. So what broke? Well, so a problem in the EC2 network load balancer health monitor, which is a key subsystem, as you can imagine, caused a big time failure. It suggested perhaps an update.
ironically, it could have been an update pushed by a single person that could have taken all of this out because that triggered DNS resolution failures. Are they still employed? Good question. And then app endpoints for DynamoDB and SimpleQ service, Lambda, and others was offline. Then it spread. There was sort of a global ripple effect. There was over 4 million reports at Snapchat, Reddit, Venmo, Zoom, Roblox, Prime Video, etc.. Etc.. Etc., all impacted. Apparently Apple, too. uh aws is still digging into the exact trigger so. The iphone 11 is working just fine now.
Yeah yeah go figure yeah uh we will get a more uh more info in a full postmortem soon this does echo similar u.s east 1 dns issues in 2020 and 2021 so 8 a.m on october 20th we had initial reports, midday it was peak impact on october 20th according to their timeline 3 p.m on the 20th they begin announcing that they were trying to restore service. By the 21st, all services were reported as normal. Now, I think there's an interesting takeaway here that tells us quite a bit. And I find this to be semi-alarming. Amazon stock is up on this news.
Think about that. They took out the entire internet for a day. Yeah. Well, how many people signed up for Prime yesterday? It's me. I did that. You did it. No, to the wider world. That is interesting. It revealed how essential AWS is. Yeah. And that companies can't function, and how locked in they are. And only three companies really control what is considered the cloud, right? You have Amazon at 32% of the market, Microsoft at 23% of the market, and Google Cloud at 10% of the market. And AWS is why Amazon is in the Mag-7. That's the top seven stocks of the S&P 500. And Amazon also has, obviously, they're selling. They have a logistics network for delivery. and they have advertising, which is growing really fast.
And so when this outage occurred, the message that the market took away was that Amazon's too important and that you should buy some. Yeah. Jeez. And like, I think they're right. I don't think there's walking this back anytime soon. You did see some people take their victory laps that their infrastructure was still online. Or, yeah, this is why we switched to self-hosting. There were a few people out there having their moment. And I was kind of in that group, too. I wasn't really too impacted outside of that iPhone 11. However, there's no walking this back, at least not for a decade.
So does Facebook not use AWS services, or did they have an easy failover? I think they have their own data centers, sort of like Google. Yeah, okay. So a lot of the big ones have their own. Yeah. Yeah, man, what crazy outage. And like I said, send us a message. Let me know how you are impacted by it because I just think just about everybody. Even if you're a big self-hoster, you were touched by this. And even though Amazon offers multiple regions and best practices and yada, yada, yada, all say multi-region, et cetera, et cetera, that kind of software is extremely hard to build. And any weak piece in there messes it up.
Not to mention SLAs. Oh, yeah. Amazon's going to be issuing a lot of credits. Yeah. A lot of credits. All right, this week I'm playing one of my favorites. It's Ollie, and this is Burning Room. If you boost in while the song plays, 95% of the sats go to Ollie. We got a nice little handful of voicemails this week, and we're starting to get a pattern of some regulars that call in, and that's always nice to check in. It's like hearing from old friends. And Mark from Michigan is our first caller this week. Oh. If I hear it, Mark, I'll let you know. You know, Labor Day is not a bad time to be here. A little busy. Not a bad time.
You know, you could do the... If you've never been to Seattle, it's fun to do the public market. the Space Needle. And the underground Seattle. Yeah, absolutely. Especially if it's warm. Underground Seattle can be a nice treat. The nice thing about this is personally my opinion about the Pacific Northwest is you have a really high success rate when it comes to restaurants. There are a couple of stinkers, but it's not like other places in the country where you can actually go and it's an awful restaurant and the food is terrible. Our average food is really good. And then of course our seafood Food is fantastic.
Mark, I'd like to know, why do you live so far out? What's out there? Is it a cabin? Is it a piece of property? Is it a habit? Why so far out? Do you not like living next to people? Yeah. All right. Well, look at this. Rastacastavara is back. It's been a little bit since we've heard from him. Ooh. Whoa. Oh. Yep. Hmm. Just get a battery. he calls back But I wanted to comment on the – he does. You know, I wonder if the rush for AI integration in places like medical is because what they're essentially hoping for on the other end is the ability to do a massive staff reduction, an efficiency gain.
I mean, right? That is what it seems like. Yeah. That's why you would – and it's maybe in that particular field they feel like that's an area. Yeah. Too many button pushers? Or costs or not enough people, you know, and so they can't get they can't hire enough. So there's, you know, well, we got nothing better. So we're gonna start using the machines. But Rasta calls back. Quick cold turkey. Well, they can't use Prime for that. Yeah. Right. Here's what happened to me is I was like, all right, I'm going to do the brick and mortar thing and I'm going to go there and we're just going to buy it locally and it's fine and I'll get it right away. So it'll be great.
And I go to the auto parts store and you know what they tell me every effing time. Oh, we don't carry that, but we could order it for you. We can get here in a couple of days or maybe tomorrow. Yeah. And I'm like, yeah, so can I, buddy. It's called Amazon. Like I came to you because I was hoping you had it right now. All right. Another example. and like I have I have a hundred of these but uh the coldest slap in the face I got recently when. It comes to brick and mortar retail stores is I went to Best Buy and I realized they don't actually want you shopping Best Buy doesn't want you shopping at Best Buy they want you to place your order in the app ahead of time and then show up and pick it up and so like they're taking stuff off the shelves they're not they're not putting as much effort into the presentation they're they're clearly funneling all of the traffic for that type and then like if you happen to just be some weirdo retail shopper.
You can also get in line with the people that use the app. That's where we're at now. Yeah. Two things. Costco, not so bad. One, O'Reilly's has hub stores. And O'Reilly's is an auto parts store. They have hub stores and they have a crew of drivers that every day do the different routes in the areas. Yeah, they can get it usually within a day. Well, so each time they do their routes, It's like four times a day. And so they have a system in place to get parts a lot faster. I guess it's because I'm a fancy boy with a VW and a Volvo, and it's not like a Ford or a GM. I guess.
Although we go in with Brent's van, which is a quintessential Dodge platform that went from the 70s to the late 90s, and it was ubiquitous. And they don't have parts for it. Yeah. Oh, you know, it's just... But yeah, O'Reilly's has got a good network. So does Advanced. They have good parts networks. But they're just not super consistent about what they stock. And it's just all retail. $700 now. Okay, so SideQuest. Best Buy was rough. Panda Express opened in Lake Stevens. Oh, yeah? Yeah. And I don't recall ever having had Panda Express. I know there's one right here by the studio. I got horrible food problems.
Right? Or get them repaired. Wow. Rough. Okay. Well, so, okay. Okay, similar to Chick-fil-A on 88th or 116th. I can never remember which one. Wherever Chick-fil-A is nearby, they didn't design it right. They ended up shutting down for two or three weeks and redesigning. Really? Because their parking lot was horrible. Their drive-thru was horrible. Everything was horrible. I'm talking about blowing it. Yeah, yeah. And the Chick-fil-A is coming in right across from Panda Express in Lake Seaman. So I'm really excited about that. That's a good fight.
And hopefully they do it right in the first place. But what Panda did, and they seem to have thought a little bit better about it, but I went last week. I think it was one day after they opened, right? So still everybody's really excited. But they have two lines. They have the line for people that are stupid and just walk in. And then they have a line for mobile and pickup. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep. And I thought, that's really smart. And that way, you know, but the lines were, you know, 25 feet long. Both lines. It was crazy.
Jeez, really? Yeah. And the people in the kitchen, like, you can see them all there and cooking and restocking. There's at least 20 people working. It was crazy. And it was really good. That's what I said. I do. I really like Panda Express. It was really good. I'll tell you. I'll tell you what was great. First of all, get a Quiznos on the way out of Denver. Haven't had Quiznos in the hot minute. Chicken carbonara again. Do recommend. And then, on our last day on the road back, Wes and I picked up a little BK. Stopped by and got the King in one of their breakfast sandwiches that I haven't had in a long time. Got it our way.
What's our way? That's just their slogan. Oh, okay. I wasn't sure if I forgot. I still have only had Burger King. I can now count on two hands how many times I've had Burger King. Yeah, I've had that. Yeah. But it was fun. Props to Burger King. You know what? They're trying to compete. All right, a guy named Ryan called in. Yeah, I literally passed it a couple hours ago, so I don't even know what my score was. All I know is I passed, so I'm sure I'll get the badge and other things from AWS in a couple of days. So, yeah, I'll do that whole public celebration thing. But, yeah.
So, thank you very much. I wanted to share that with you guys. But, yeah, as far as the phone case is concerned, I'll just piggyback on – well, actually, I'll tell you my quick story. You wanted to know what the odd disasters were. I don't know how odd it is, but it's odd for us. My wife, not once but twice, left it on the top of the car. And we found out, you know, a mile or so down the road, go back, big old crack right through the middle of it. And it had, you know, so that's as disastrous as it got for us. So, yeah. Yeah.
Thank you. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh. Right. I'm kidding. Well, yeah, we'll see what the audience comes up with throughout the week about their disaster stories and maybe what they've done to recover. He has another voicemail, but before we play it. That is so tricky with the water pump, right? Because technically they can replace the water pump and claim job done. And I think the key thing to do in these situations is say, why do you believe the water pump failed? What is your best diagnostic reason for why the water pump failed? Because then that might lead to a conversation that gets to, should we also be flushing this?
Because the pump can fail, and if the pump is struggling, if there was a blockage, you can imagine a lot of pressure and strain on those hoses built up all the time. And then you get the new pump in there, and it's back to full power. And it probably very quickly ruptured that hose. Now, as a shop, I think they should own that. But technically, they did the job and replaced the water pump. And I would imagine those hoses are pretty hard to get to. Which is probably why they didn't replace them to begin with. But if you got to the root of why it failed in the conversation.
That's just such a sucky situation. Any shredded cheese that you like can be really cool. Good job sticking with it. Nine days. Thanks so much for the show. Dog with a bone. All right, so it calls back. For this show, you really should consider a pick each week, a recipe pick. Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Hey guys, it's Faraday Fedora again. I have a bit of a problem with Crashmaster. We're there with the shepherd's pie. Shepherd's pie never has ground beef, it's ground lamb. Ground beef makes cottage pie, which there's nothing wrong with, just a bit of a formality there. And then for the mashed potatoes, for the love of God, never use a food processor or a blender.
Always hand mash, otherwise you're halfway to making bread. And then what I would recommend is throw in some roasted garlic into that when you're mashing it up. And then when you put it on top of the mix, do a little kind of scrape with a fork, making a bit of a lattice pattern and sprinkle that with a bit of paprika. I wonder, a guy named Ryan, did you grow up in a place where you can? And if you can. Drizzle a bit of butter on top of that when you bake it in the oven, it'll make it nice and nice and crispy. Or is it the opposite? Like, perhaps you and I were acclimated because we lived in areas where the power went out and the parents were used to it, so it was no big deal for our parents.
It was like, all right, get the lanterns out. And it was kind of an event. And so we just have associated those fond memories with it. But, yeah, if I were scared of all of that, I think I would just gear up, gear up on, like, the lanterns and the automatic lights and all of that. The backup batteries. Yeah. When the power goes out, it's daylight. That's how I would do it. Thank you, Guy. Your name is Ryan. Appreciate the calls. And we have, I think he said Iron Joe. I don't think it's Mark, but I think it's another caller from Michigan. Specifically about rats.
I've had a couple Raffa's pets. Names were Potter and Pepper. Pepper was white gray brown and Otter after Beatrice. They were hands down the best pets I have ever had. And I've had cats, dogs, just about every kind of hamster, fish, snake, turtle, anything you can think of. I've even had a gator and for the record I am Canadian living in Canada. you can train rats way better than dogs they are incredibly affectionate and despite their reputation they're also super clean animals you know obviously get a rat from a pet store I wonder if any. Of our local tire.
Shops the only two big downsides is they only live in a few years or. Would it be through insurance shortly. After our first rat and the back driver's side tire is down A massive, huge pile of nuts and dry food fell off from inside. I finally did put air in it last night. Mine's losing like eight a day. It's a massive pile, enough to pile up on it. That's insane. I know. It turned out that sometimes it treats you had been giving her over the years. I've gone to a Chevron and a Shell. Yeah, and it won't do it. I had to use Apple Cash.
I picked up, you can look at these, they're on Amazon. I picked up like a portable drill-style air pump. Yeah, I know, I need to. Yeah, somebody recommended that to me, and I'm like, I don't need it. So they have this kind of urge to chew on things. So you just give them lots of voice that you want. I don't want to deal with it, but that's great information. Thank you, everybody who called in. I also wanted to mention this incredibly amazing office. We put the phone number right there in our show notes. You don't even have to remember it. You can just look at the show notes and call in. Leave us a voicemail.
And all my self-hosted stuff. Like, this is seriously a huge, huge deal. This project might actually finally usher in the year of the Linux desktop. And PJ comes in as our baller booster this week with 22,222 sats. Welcome back, guys. We had many power outages from summer monsoons as a kid in Arizona. We would light candles and watch the clouds and lightning roll over. We'd enjoy the cool weather outside and count the seconds between lightning and thunder to see if it was coming or going. Oh, yeah. Okay, we definitely do that. Yeah, yeah.
You got it. If it's stormy. Sometimes there's, like, nothing going on and we've lost power. It's not as fun. Or just wind and rain. No lightning. Yeah, you know, in Arizona, too, and other places, when that comes in, the temperature just drops. You get a little relief. These days, I'd probably spend the entire time of the outage bringing up a power source just for it to come back in time by the time it's time done. Yeah, I know. Right? You get the bar and door fixed just as the horses come home. Just thinking about that. Thank you, PJ.
Thank you for being our baller booster. Appreciate that. Out there in the Pacific Northwest. Retro Gear is here with 3,000. Sacks. Interesting news on Flock. And he links us to an area, a town, I guess. Flock cameras to be paused within the next 24 hours. Eugene City. Good for them. She is working with police chief to pause activity on all flock cameras in the next 24 hours during a city council meeting on Monday. The decision comes after the city council unanimously voted to recommend the mandatory pause on the cameras during October 8th work session after months of public screening. Hey, Chris and Angie.
So is it a permanent decision? I think so. Yeah. Eugene residents took to public comment to express their dissatisfaction with the installation of the flock cameras. Urgent City Council to terminate the city's contract and lock safety. Well, how come we're not all doing that? Right? Everybody do it. Yeah, that seems like the way to go. Let me just make a small section for food. Right. Get out there and stir up some crap. Pabby's here with a row of ducks. Yeah, hopefully I am not too late for this. It was just the color line. I'm not sure if that's better.
Oh, right, for Lime. Right. It's just the color line, not the color line. You can't even remember the last power outage we had probably 10 plus years ago. My go-to now would be reading. The Kindle lasts for weeks. And there's a line integrated. Yes, nice. Reading is good to do during a power outage. Also, how many of us immediately go to the stupid little light on our phones in those moments too? Oh, yeah. The flashlight? Yeah. The torch, as they call it. It's Magnolia again. All right, here we go. Bit-ish comes in with 4,200 sats. The suggestions I made, I think it was the last episode, maybe the one before that.
Thanks for playing Mookie on the launch. Honored to be featured. I featured track again. You've played once before, and we'll keep coming. We'll keep on spinning. We love Mookie. Thank you for the boost. Nice to hear from you. That's fine. I'll just wait for it to renew. Hey, there's Turd Ferguson. He's here with 12,222. Sats. You get a free trial, and you never get to use it again. That's okay. I'll just switch. AWS might be down, but the boost still worked. Well, I've got a Google account. I'm walking to the other Google account. And I got permanently banned for trying to ban a vase. Magnolia Mayhem's here with 8,642 cents. I was sending my suggestion of Warp Criminal. That's pretty much it.
I don't think people realize or recognize the importance of what is being done here with boosting ads are more than just annoying blurb to be skipped. They're socially accepted propaganda. We've had this culture across media since the beginning, and we just accept that someone can waltz up to the show, slap down a checkbook and change the opinions of the windows of our change, the opinions of our windows to the world. Random new listener started. It wasn't OK in the 1920s with radio and it's not OK in the 2020s with podcasts. I just wanted to say that I've been using this end browser for a couple of eight months now.
And it has been pretty awesome. The only comments I have that you didn't mention. I agree. And, you know, each one of these ad deals is its own bespoke negotiations. You don't know what's gone into the deal. You just have to trust that the podcaster is negotiating in best faith. Or the content creator. You can split more than two. I've gone up to four. It's particularly pervasive on YouTube. The amount of free crap YouTubers get. It is hard. As somebody who's been doing this for a very long time, I realized very early on if I buy a laptop versus given a laptop, if I'm given a laptop, I was much more inclined to look over small things like maybe the screen didn't shut off when I closed the lid. Who cares? I got it for free.
But if I spent $2,000, that screen better effing turn off. Right. It's a mental shift. And this is so pervasive. You're really on to something here because it goes beyond just the fact that we waltz in and have propaganda and it's just, we normalized it, but to the point of it's so obscure and opaque behind the scenes as well. And the booths are the exact opposite of that. Everything's in the RSS feed. The spec is open. The lightning network is open. It's the exact 180. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate that, Magnolia. It's a good one. Also, thanks for hanging out in the quiet listening.
Okay, so we had three of you. Oh, that hurts right there. That hurts right there to even say it. We had three of you stream sats. What happened? Well, maybe AWS is still down. Can we blame that? No. I don't think we can blame that. Okay, so we had three of you stream sats, and collectively you stacked 2,565 sats. Well, thank you very much. I do appreciate that yeah it's not too bad I suppose that's pretty bad and then when you combine that with our boosts we stacked 55,073. Sets hey it's uh Magnolia Mayhem, I feel I feel really bad I was considering calling in over like three or four things and seeing you kind of pushing me over the edge I.
Think it's because we took the time off. I feel so bad because we took the time off. They'll come back, right? Once they see a couple episodes in the feed? They'll come back. Thank you, everybody who does support the show with a boost or a Jupiter Party membership. Or a voice me. Yeah. I really appreciate it. I import all my Firefox add-ons. It was a one-to-one thing. I just like... It lets you sign into your Firefox account. All right, so here is what is now actually being called. Quite literally, the heist of the century. The Louvre, the world's biggest museum, a symbol of France, now a crime scene.
On Sunday morning, in broad daylight, a gang of four professional thieves used this mechanical ladder to reach the first floor window of the Galleria d'Apollon. Who's actually really a crane. Huh. It's a crane ladder. So they took a truck with a crane ladder, backed it up to the museum, and then busted this thing up the side of the museum into one of the windows. Using battery-powered disc cutters, two of them broke into the gallery's most ornate rooms, housing France's royal jewels. Threatening security guards, they proceeded to smash display cases, stealing nine items, before trying to set fire to the ladder vehicle, then making their escape on scooters.
No one was injured in the robbery, with the museum being evacuated and closed for the rest of the day. The nine stolen items all date from France's 19th century royalty, and are encrusted with thousands of diamonds and other precious gemstones. They include a brooch that once belonged to Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III. And a pair of emerald earrings. Yes. Empress Eugenie's crown was found near the scene, apparently dropped by the thieves in their haste to get away. Yeah, they dropped one. Can you believe that? They don't know who it is. They're still searching for them. Oh, this is so crazy.
Will they ever recover these? I don't know, because there are so many small little jewels. I was looking into this, and what they will do is two things. They'll break them up into smaller pieces and sell those, which there's a big demand for precious metals and stuff. Or they wait for the insurance companies to capitulate, which seemingly always happens. And then the insurance companies will make a multi-million dollar, no questions answered offer. If somebody just returns these items, they'll get a million dollars. We won't ask any questions.
Right. And then they cash in that way. Wow. Crazy, huh? Crazy old school. And I guess they've had a whole rash of museum break-ins, but that one's like nothing else. Yeah, that is crazy. Yeah. So they didn't have, like, lasers? No, not like they do in the movies. Come on. They had some, like, bolt cutters they had to go through. But, yeah, they clearly had a plan. Yeah. But it wasn't that crazy of a plan. No. Risky. It probably just looked like construction, too. Yeah. Like, they probably, yeah, wow. All right. Now we've got to do this next thing. I'm very excited about this. Okay. Not quite what I've invasioned, but since I was a young lad, I have dreamed of a health sensor that I thought the technology would eventually be here for.
And once it arrived, it would give us a whole new level of insights into our day-to-day health. Oh, are you talking about AI solving cancer? Maybe. I mean, it might through this. I mean, once you get the data, you got to have the data first, Ang. So chime in when you've figured out what this product is. The Tricorder? Oh, wouldn't that be great? I would be so excited about that. No, no. Well, it's like a localized Tricorder. Okay. Can I look at your – Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. Introducing Dakota by Kohler Health. Tricoda.
A first-of-its-kind product that illuminates your path to better living. Dakota translates your body's signals into real-time insights. All right. Body signals. Helping you decode your body's cues. Focusing on pattern detection for... Okay, so body cues, pattern detection. Do you have a guess yet? No. No? Gut health and hydration. Dakota uses advanced spectroscopy sensors to seamlessly analyze what your body leaves behind. Its sleek, self-clamping design blends seamlessly into any bathroom. Oh, my God. While privacy... All right, what do you think it does?
Oh, my God. What do you think it does? Well, I see it's clipped on the side of the toilet here. It's a toilet sensor with a camera. Yeah, it makes me laugh so hard. This video goes into, which I'll link in the show notes. It's so dumb. It's so great. It lights the path. I'm like, oh, okay, it's emergency lights. It lights the path of what you leave behind. It senses what your body is feeling. The best part is the price. Wait till we get to the price. Kohler just dropped one of the most eyebrow-raising gadgets we've seen, the Dakota, a $599 camera that mounts onto your toilet bowl and snapshots what you flush.
The device attaches under the rim of the toilet, points down at the bowl, and uses imaging plus AI to analyze your waste for indicators of gut health, hydration, and even blood traces. It includes a fingerprint scanner so it knows who is on the throne. You'll need the hardware. $599, plus a subscription between $70 and $156 per month to get full diagnostics. Now, I think they've lowered the subscription prices. Okay. So it gets more expensive depending on, you know, what kind of insights you want from your poop. And if you want individual family poop analysis, So if you want whole house poop analysis, that costs more. But if you're a single household pooper, you get it for cheaper.
Well, without that fingerprint, it's like, okay, who pooped at 2 p.m.? Now you got a poop log. Kohler pre-orders begin now with shipments starting tomorrow, October 21. On the privacy front, Kohler insists the camera sees down into your toilet and nowhere else. It also claims data is encrypted end to end. This isn't just another smart bathroom gadget. It signals how far health tech is willing to go. The bathroom, the most private place in your home, is now a frontier for diagnostics. If the Dakota works as advertised, it could help detect medical issues early. But the fact it's a camera looking at your body's most intimate moments raises big privacy and ethical flags.
So when I was a young lad, I thought something like this would come along, but I didn't think it'd be a camera. I thought it'd just be like, you know, chemical sensors in the toilet. It would be like, hey, bro, you got too much S in your, you're in or whatever you've been partying a bit, but this they, so of course, and as you would expect, because of the type of image analysis it has to do, there's like an AI angle to all of this as well. So I don't know. The first features like remote fingerprint authentication and end to end encryption are designed to keep.
Oh, yeah. Dakota delivers personalized... That's the wild thing, too, is the screenshots of the app, the data is not very useful. It's just like you're doing okay hydration-wise. Good job. Like, it's not... Yeah. Like, it's not particularly useful. ...health scores to help build lasting, healthy habits. It's everything your body's been trying to tell you, Decoded. The future of health starts here with Dakota. What do you think? I don't know. I mean, you know, I was supposed to provide a sample to my doctor like sometime in the last year. And I decided I just didn't.
Yeah. Who wants to do that? I know. I guess what if you could, what if the doctor sent you home with one of these you clip on for like a weekend? Oh, well, no, it was just like a, it was a collection bag. No, I know. And a popsicle stick. What if instead, what if instead they could offer you take home, you know, the fecal scanner and it. I wouldn't trust that. Just taking a picture? I mean, picture says a thousand words, right? I don't know. Only a thousand. Can we take a moment for the poor souls that had to train this data system? They had to analyze a lot of data in order to build this. They were looking at pictures of poop for years.
Mm-hmm. Imagine. So what do you do for a living? Well, let me tell you, I'm working for this AI startup. Oh, how exciting. No. Think about that for a moment. All right. Well, if you'd buy one of these, you got to boost in or call in and tell us why. What would you do with it? Okay. And what if it was $199 with local analysis? this? You know, okay. So I am taking iron pills right now because I'm iron deficient again. I'm taking six a day. My stool is definitely different now. Okay. You know? And I wonder if that would throw it off. Well, or tell you something's wrong. What if they could say, hey, what if they could really analyze and be like, maybe you should eat a little bit of this. Eat a little bit of this, add this to your diet.
Yeah. Well, I would have to say I'm allergic to that. Based on your poo, Based on your poo, we have determined. Oh, my gosh. All right. I think that's about as low as we can go. Yep. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in to this week's episode of The Launch. Links to what we talked about at weeklylaunch.rocks. Remember, we want to hear your AWS outage stories, good or bad. And we'd love it if you joined us live next Tuesday. We could use a few more of the live vibe. So catch us in your podcast app or at jblive.tv on a Tuesday. We'll be out for a download on a Wednesday.
from the beautiful Pacific Northwest and the mighty American West Coast. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you right back here next week.
