Yesterday, while trying to run some updates through Ubuntu's Update Manager, I was informed that the Chrome repository could not be reached.

Since January, when Google made their China related announcement, I started noticing that Update Manager was getting slower, mostly because the Google Chrome updates were taking an extra-ordinarily long time, reaching download speeds of only 7 to 8 Kbps. I found this strange, previously, it would fly through 30 to 50MB of updates in less than 10 minutes, including the usual 11MB to 18MB Chrome update (I use the weekly build repository). After I put out a call to the Twitterverse to see if anyone else was/is having this problem, I decided it would be best not to jump to conclusions and do some research ... in retrospect, my logic was of the ass-backwards variety here. So, I hopped on Google and started searching around on all my regular help sites. Low and behold, it didn't take long for me to find something similar in Ubuntu Forums along with some possible answers ... this is where I started to realize the ass-backwardness of my logic. Turns out, it had nothing to do with Google vs. China (oops, my bad), but it did have a lot to do with Google and Ubuntu, more to the point, an incompatibility between Ubuntu's Update Manager and the HTTP/1.1 Pipelining on Google's server (I would love to explain that for you, but I'm still waiting for someone to explain it to me), and it had, evidently been going on for some time, since January 17th, according to this forum post. The article's I read suggested several work arounds like; create a file with instructions for the Pipeline, remove/uncheck the repository until the issue is fixed, or just simply uninstall Google Chrome. Being a person who puts bread on the table by providing technical support for a pretty big computer manufacturer, I have several problems with these; first, I don't like work arounds, they don't fix problems, they just hide them for awhile so they can come back bigger and nastier at a later time; second, I still don't know what Pipelining is; third, I like Chrome and I'm not going to remove it; last, from my experience, updates generally make a product better in some way (more secure, faster, new feature, etc) and I didn't want to disable the updates. So, I did what I should have done in the first place, I opened Terminal, ran sudo apt-get update, then ran Update Manager again, and the problem fixed itself ... talk about feeling like a dunce :~

Moral of the story, don't be a jackass (like me) and make assumptions based on limited data. Remember, when you assume something, you're just making an ASS out of U and ME.