Friends

This week was a lot of fun, aside from being up and down emotionally. I got to attend the Thigh Scream Social -- a roller derby skills camp – which was a great time. I enjoyed it so much that I think I’m going to join the men’s league here in town as soon as I figure out when and where practices are that won’t conflict with this weekend’s plans or my work schedule. I’d go to the practice with them Sunday, but I’m going to be in Chicago with hotarugirl. B)

( The boring details )

*“You know, the whip is the fastest way to gain speed on the track!”
-- 'Hot Tub' Johnny Rocket, Whip It

The power to stop time and not age while I got things done. Hands-down. Failing that, the ability to go without sleep so I could at least get eight extra hours (OK, 6) a day. Alternately, the ability to clone myself would be great, especially if I had access to the experiences and memories of all the clones. B)

Hair pulled pussy

Ahhh to get out of the male mind and into the FEMALE mind , what an oppurutunity , given because I asked for the opportunity ….” Hey look I write and run a web site devoted to social anthropology , just human life issues seen from an LATER NAITVE perpective and an well you are an interesting young woman an I would value verymuch to gather inspiration for talking with you in detail about some issues “ I was supprized at how naturally I go those words out to this young woman ,,,so I sent her to my site and ..low and behold she said yes , and wee met for coofeee

Nice thing about his cooffe stop it has a couple tables out side off to the side and no one ever uses them so , we were albe to talk without disruption , I had no idea what I would talk about ohhh , sure I gotta admit to having some ...more at instinctualism2

"The Christian faith for most people is not communicated by doctrinal pronouncements ... but by what goes on in the church in its most local setting. It is here, in the church down the street, that people are caught up in the Gospel promise -- or are turned away."

- James C. Fenhagen, from his book Mutual Ministry

This.

In the last 24 hours:

• 12:12 Feeling down today. I was so giddy from endorphins after practice last night that I wonder if this is the skating version of sub drop. B) #

(Automatically shipped at midnight by LoudTwitter)

In the last 24 hours:

• 18:30 Off to the last day of the Thigh Scream Social. Today I get to get knocked on my ass. :D #
• 22:16 Graduated derby boot camp! According to their end-of-practice announcement, I am now officially a derby girl. ;) #

(Automatically shipped at midnight by LoudTwitter)

So our furnace has been acting up. I did lots of research on tech forums, especially cozyparts.com, which has a great forum with Lennox techs on it. Then I replaced the thermostat. That fixed the problem for exactly 1 day. Now it's even deader than it was. The damper opens, and the igniter sparks for 15 seconds, but it won't ignite. Likely it's a problem in the ignition control from what I'm reading, or possibly the sensor switch on the damper. My DIY chops include plumbing and wiring, but fall short of tearing into gas appliances. When I get paid Friday, it looks like I have to get a tech out here. Dammit. Gonna be a cold couple of evenings at Red Base.

CNN is all over Governor Perry about the Cameron Todd Willington execution. Not following it until recently, our governor is accused of executing an innocent man. Harsh stuff, anti-death penalty opponents have swarmed into the state screaming about it. Gov didn't do himself any favors by replacing the panel that was investigating it. So gov had an innocent man killed, right?

Today one of Perry's most adamant critics, State Senator Dan Patrick came out in support of the governor. They are both Republicans, but the similarities stop there. Perry votes with the wind, and tends to be in bed with special interests. Patrick is heavily anti-tax, and fights with Perry over everything. But Patrick came out with the original arson investigator that the critics are screaming about.

Turns out the critics brought in their own expert. His complaint? The local one wasn't as educated as him. Their expert is the same one that said the governor mansion fire here was accidental, until they found footage of the arsonist throwing a molotov cocktail. CNN didn't report a single fact defending the execution, despite various people involved volunteering.

Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

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On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.