Henchmen

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.

I was super efficient for a very short period of time today. I got up, had breakfast, went to the doctor (didn't learn anything new, still have weird sympthomes with no apparent cause and no cure) set the date for yet another doctor's appointment, stole a cup of coffee because I didn't have time to wait for the cafeteria lady to come back from the restroom, wrote a rough draft of my new chapter, experienced a short computer crisis, fixed the computer crisis, met a fellow student to look at her draft and have her look at mine, consolidated my notes, paid for the coffee I stole while the cafeteria lady glared at me and then walked home instead of taking the bus.

I was going to keep writing as I got here. Instead I watched Castle, Californication and How I met your mother. Still, it's been a pretty productive day. I feel ready to get cracking on that chapter this weekend (it's due Monday, last minute writing ftw.). Now, safely tucked in my pj's (thanks again abigor60 and chesire_monkey), I feel ready to do the dishes at least.

(On a related note, this has been the nicest doctor's visit I've had in years. It doesn't say much, of course. Basically, as long as noone accuses me of being a sexual freak, makes me wait for more than an hour or refuses to treat me, I feel it's been a success. Still, today the nurse asked me what kind of shop I was no longer employed at, and when I told her it was Oslo's largest sex shop she got really interested and asked for the address with a smile. Then, I didn't have to wait to get my blood work done and they only had to poke me with the needle once to get it done. Good day!)

EDIT: If you're reading this, our maintenance is OVER! The problem was not found on our equipment, which means we'll have to work with our ISP to fix this small problem -- which also means another maintenance window in the future -- but at least we have eliminated our side.

Thank you everyone, and a special shout out to rekoil for giving me a great suggestion AND also the opportunity to feel like I've just called in to a local radio station.

Have a great day, night or afternoon wherever you may be.

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Hi everyone, sorry for the late notice but I'm going to have to do some testing on 1 of our 4 internet circuits TONIGHT; Friday night or Saturday morning depending on which time zone you're in.

Most of us shouldn't notice any impact, though there may be some slowness or lag when I switch traffic on to our other ISP circuits and then another hit when I stop the tests. If a page won't load or times out, try hitting refresh 1 or 2 times and it should load then. If it doesn't work at all... trust me, I'll be typing really really really fast to try to undo whatever I just did. Hopefully you'll have some Halloween candy (if you're in the USA and celebrate that kind of thing) nearby to take away the bitterness of a small site outage. :(

Here's the handy-dandy Website That I Always Use to get a feel for when the maintenance will start in your area. Our site traffic historically dips on Friday afternoons until Saturday morning which is why we tend to pick this time for maintenance work.

( tech details )

status.livejournal.org will, of course be updated before and after the maintenance window. Or else marta will get mad at me. :D

bt

Training takes up a big part of my spare time these days, so I figured I should mention it to you guys. Right now, I'm doing starting strength (for info, see: http://startingstrength.wikia.com/wiki/Starting_Strength_Wiki).

It is great for several reasons. First of all, lifting really heavy weights is good for you. It builds muscle, it fixes your back problems by making your stabilizing muscles stronger and by pushing your body and actually putting demands on it, makes it heal itself (or, at least that's my experience. I've been dealing with back trouble my whole life and my lower back has never been this good.) In addition, it's fun, it's social (I go with 3 other people) and it means that 3 times a week, I get confirmation that I'm getting better at something.

Yesterday, both me and 3ff3ct3r broke our records on squatting. Here's me lifting 60kg (132 lb):

and here's 3ff3ct3r lifting 150kg (330lbs):

That's right, my boyfriend is a badass. And I'm becoming a badass too.

(The reason why there're no pics of Peter and Marthe, our training buddies, is because they had to take yesterday off, not because they're not badasses, because they are.)