Friday Musings: Redundancy

Sorry for the lack of content lately. Work has been crazy, and I had a lazy five-day weekend that I decided to use for vegging out more than geeking out. Whilst camping over the Memorial Day weekend, I did come to appreciate the redundancy built in to Mag Instrument's AA Mini-Mag (and most other lights of theirs), a spare bulb hiding in the tail cap right below the battery spring:


I got this flashlight almost a decade ago as schwag (and seriously nice schwag at that) from Check Point while working at a Check Point Value-Added Reseller as a support technician and penetration tester. The bulb that burned out over this last weekend was the original. I can't even imagine how many hours of burn-time it had, how many drops to the pavement it's taken, or how many times it saved my ass.



I only wish that this kind of redundancy was more common in everyday life from household appliances to consumer-grade electronics. Parts that are most prone to failure should be included. Some old vacuum cleaners even came with a spare drive belt and a nice place to store it.

Now, it seems you only see redundancy addressed when you're dealing with large-scale Enterprise IT and industrial- or military-grade machinery. Otherwise, it's:


Somewhere in history, we've lost our way...