Looks like OC Parties are a trend. It also appears it's a bit of a cash cow. After reading that one wonders if they actually had any purpose other than to latch onto cultural fads and launch them into money makers.
My biggest remaining question is why isn't schdav quoted? My only guess is something to do with all the people mentioned in it are in high school... :)
Sounds almost believable given their history.
Inspired by JL! a while back, I finally got around to updating my RSS feeds. I split into two feeds, one for the main entries here, and the second for the comments. Both are also not just top x, but incorporate a time-based criteria as well. So if I stop updating (or people stop commenting), my feed won't become like some certain ones where old entries pop back up in the RSS readers since they're so old. Yea, that's working with bad client design (expire based on fetch date rather than last seen), but it seems to be a common bad client design.
Anyways, the feeds are in the source code of the main index. For those too lazy to look, they're Entries and Comments.
As I already had code to handle scheduled but action-based static files updates in place for sitemaps, I used it for this too. The feeds are also now static files, making readers that pay attention to last update times at the HTTP level more efficient. This also means that there may be a few minutes delay before entries or comments appear in the feeds. If you're pulling them at any sane interval (>= 15 minutes), you won't notice. You may have also already noticed the other new addition. If you haven't you apparently don't use RSS.
The weekend was long, but good. Saturday involved getting annoyed at my alarm at 2am, followed by leaving for the parents' place shortly after 2:30. Given that I usually sleep about 12 hours later than this on Saturday, this was a stretch. We then left for up north at around 3:30, and arrived a bit before 8. Of course at this point we realized that due to the unknown weather and roads we had left some extra time, we were a bit hungry, and we neglected to note that non-packaged food is a bit harder to find in rural MN than in the metro area. So after consulting google it was 30 miles of backtracking to find some food and a place to change, and then head back to the wedding at 10. What's an extra 60 miles when you're going 500? :) That was good, and had an interesting mix of American and Zambian cultures (the family has lived there up until a few years ago). At some point we finally ended up going back, and after making much better time on the way back (although still had to slow down to 45 in most towns, and 30 in some like LP - crazy small town MN, that's slower than the street I live on) and arrived back around 6. Then watched a movie with the family, and finally got to go home and sleep around 11. Long, but probably worthwhile day. I do wish I could have spent more time listening to music or something rather than driving though.
The movie was Beyond the Gates of Splendor, about the Waodanis and the missionaries who they killed, of which Nate Saint and Jim Elliot are the only two that are probably generally recognizable. It's been like 13-14 years since I read their biographies, so I don't remember much about how much was covered there vs in the movie, but it was definitely interesting. It did focus more on the later changes of the tribe where I remember the books I read focusing more on the initial contact and gaining trust before the seemingly sudden change. Anyways, it's a good movie, and I recommend it (even though I was falling asleep through it). There's another movie called End of the Spear which looks like it should be good too. I think one of the more interesting parts is how their culture has gone one direction, while they see the US as going in the opposite direction (why they allowed the movie to be made about them).
Back to the weekend, Sunday didn't provide a chance to catch up on sleep. Church, and then family birthdays in the afternoon. Did get home and have a chance to relax a bit, but then work comes early in the morning. That was a bit smoother than last week (as we had already run through the stuff last week), but still rather busy. Dave and I are spending plenty of time figuring out strategies and priorities. I'm glad I spent the time pestering to so I have a workable understanding of most everything though, and pushed things just far enough so that I'd have a reference of where it was on the to-do list and prerequisites, as the process could be a lot worse. I think we're making good progress though at cleaning up loose stuff, some of which just sat because it hadn't been revisited yet after things had been resolved, and some just gets the "too bad, this won't be fixed because the whole system will probably be scrapped at some point". I like those because it's less work for us. :) We'll see what tomorrow brings. Besides Sesame Beef that is.
This week went well, although we were rather busy. What saved us was that it seemed everyone had already left for break even if they hadn't left physically, and new requests didn't really pile in. The real test would be next week though. The network upgrades didn't cause any problems, which has amazed me - that's progress I guess. We made good progress on some stuff, and I even trained the spam filters a bit. Looks like the spammers had a bit of fun today, which I'm fine with as it means more training material. Other stuff was mainly getting more things automated/self-service so I don't have to deal with them and can get other stuff done. I even got Raadt to see the light of the Qdoba.
As for turkey day, it has gone well so far. Got to spend time with the family, and have a nice meal - can't argue with those. Did spend time looking through the ads there, but nothing interesting enough to get me to buy it, and definitely nothing that'd get me out of bed early in the morning. Did some more playing with the bluetooth stuff since there was no WiFi there, and found my phone can pair with and transparently change between my pocketpc and powerbook. That's really cool because it means I don't have to do anything other than turn on bluetooth on the appropriate device to get on the net. As for the rest of the weekend it's a long car ride either this afternoon or starting around 3am on Saturday. I'm pretty indifferent, although the Saturday idea does sound good because it means I sleep in my own bed and don't have to pack anything. I'm just thankful for the long weekend...and a laptop with a DVD player...and good headphones...
So apparently this site had major issues rendering in IE, but nobody bothered to tell me this until I noticed it on someone's screen one week ago. This evening I finally booted up a Windows box, loaded up IE, and fixed the issue. Stupid IE and its css rendering. Can't blame it exclusively though I guess, apparently Moz and Safari don't treat fixed elements as floating for clears, but they act like it for everything else. Oh well, at least it's fixed now. I guess I should check my site in other browsers more often.
From a Microsoft ad featuring Xerox:
Their largest application runs on new SQL Server™ 2005 64-bit running on Windows Server™ 2003, which provides 99.999% uptime.*But what's that asterisk? Looking at the small print at the bottom of the ad reveals "*Results not typical." Guess we're now well-set in a world where you can claim anything as long as it is disclaimed properly.
So Friday went well, although a little depressing. Curt showed up, and it was good to see him again. No luck convincing either of them to come back though. Friday night was a network upgrade. Actually the only scissors involved were for making patch cables, although they did cut wires. The x-acto knife did a bit more damage, but nothing a bandaid didn't fix. Things should be faster and more scalable now, and eliminate some connectivity issues. Unfortunately the big thing I was hoping to eliminate is still there (not actually that big, it's just annoying me with lots of emails). So that's another project for next week (this should be an interesting week).
The weekend has been mainly relaxing. The first movie was Enigma, which was pretty interesting. Not sure how accurate it was, but it was decently well done. The other two weren't really movies, but rather the first two discs of Season 3 of 24. It actually looks like it could get interesting now. I'll find out next weekend I guess. For another funny thing to end the weekend (or start the work week), have you seen the parking lot advertising?
So today we took Brent out for a going away lunch. Right as we're getting ready to go, the power flickers, and a few seconds later the lights go out. A short time later there's a bit of a flicker as the generator tries to kick in, but it struggles for a few seconds delivering way less than necessary, and then goes out. We figure what luck, but our server rooms should have kicked over to a different power feed, which has an independent generator. About this time the VP walks into the hallway to say we should make sure they're up and running OK. So we split up, figuring a few minutes later we'll be on the way to lunch, and hopefully the campus will be back up when we return.
Unfortunately we arrive to find the rooms on battery power, apparently meaning the second (independent) generator system also failed to start up. A few minutes later, we know that it's an area wide thing, both generators almost immediately shut down due to overload, and the fire alarm alert thing is getting old quickly. Why can that thing work great when there's no power, but has issues holding door magnets sometimes when stuff is up? Anyways... So the lunch plans are on hold. We have a crowd of ITS people around the server room just sorta hanging out and wondering when we can go to lunch or alternatively when we need to start shutting stuff down. Some of us are shutting down unnecessary stuff to keep the heat in the room down (AC is on power transfer so can get all 3 indefinite power sources, but not battery). Bethelwulf has long since shut itself down (aka its UPSes ran out of power).
A few minutes later one of the server rooms is below the safe runtimes on the UPSes (below 1 hour is unacceptable, it takes 15-20 minutes if we work very quickly and overlap when possible to get things shut down properly), so it's time to start shutting stuff down. Of course right about the time we're actually planning shutting down production machines that have redundancies (still don't want service interruptions at this point), we hear that the power is going to be back within a few minutes. So that goes to "let's wait 5 minutes" status.
Sure enough, a couple minutes later the AC kicks online and the UPSes off battery - one feed is up and running. A few minutes later the room lights come on, as the normal building feed comes up. Quick status checks, chats with the VP and EVP who are both wandering around wondering how much of our stuff is affected, and we're off to lunch. Of course most people were off to class or work, so were much less excited about the outage being over than we were. After the last big storms came through I almost forgot how annoying actually losing power can be.
Lunch was good, large crowd, although Arby's was packed. Of course leaving at a bit after noon rather than 11:30 will do that. After getting back we discovered that the only lost equipment (at least infrastructure, and so far) was apparently one switch card, which is pretty good. We decide that another battery chassis for the one server room needs to be investigated (especially as a run to power another wiring closet is being run from it soon), and decide getting the room lights on the transfer equipment, even though it wouldn't have helped in this case, could be very handy. In the afternoon I get a call from the electrician wanting to talk about the issues and testing to make sure it doesn't happen again, checking how much delays in other stuff (like getting that feed to the closet in place) may have impacted us, and other stuff. We meet tomorrow after the cause of the second generator failure is determined (the one is unfortunately normal due to the surge load on startup, they have to bring the campus up building-by-building for it to handle it. This is why we have multiple feeds for our stuff now). Should be good to get that figured out.
So that was my day. Anything exciting happen in yours?
Copyright ©2000-2008 Jeremy Mooney (jeremy-at-qux-dot-net)
