Brian Alvey

“I’m not walking past that.”

Great night in NYC everyone.

Since we moved to AOL, we have covered something like seven Steve Jobs keynotes or events of that magnitude. Each time we’ve had some kind of horrible outage, almost all of them due to network problems. To be fair, we didn’t handle keynotes well on the pair of Windows servers we were using before we moved to AOL and switched to the third version of Blogsmith — the one Gavin and I built on Linux.

Our last outage was particularly spectacular and embarrassing so we ripped a major network bottleneck out of the way and even optimized on the database and web servers where we didn’t think we’d need to. We added a few more servers just in case. We did some load testing over the past few weeks and tweaked some configuration files.

Today we got the usual AOL hosting and networking people into a group chat with the Blogsmith and Weblogs teams and prepared for the barrage of people hitting F5 over and over to reload the live Engadget coverage to see what Steve Jobs was going to say next.

It was surreal, remarkably quiet. There was no outage, no delays in page loads. Comments poured in. New photos appeared in the post. Update after update revealed the hot Apple news. The pages loaded quickly the whole time. Traffic heated up, nothing melted down. We did it.

AOL doesn’t let anyone release actual traffic data, but I was told that at our peak we were serving something like 75% of what AOL.com serves for its peak traffic. Not bad for our little one-city blogging platform. Imagine if we moved to our multi-city version…

Engadget gave credit to our team: “Big big ups to Gavin, Celly, Mike, Christoph, all the peeps at AOL, and, of course, Brian for their expertise in keeping Engadget running under incredible load. You guys are the best!”

Thanks, Ryan! We couldn’t have done it without the whole AOL hosting team — especially Murty and Joe. Everyone from mere sysadmins all the way up to the management who run the hosting divisions were in on this, making sure we had constant updates on CPU utilization, database connections, web connections and any other metric we might need to make sure we didn’t run into any walls. We also couldn’t have done it without Engadget’s obsessive coverage.

If you’re keeping score, our team is now 1 for 8.

That might depress some people, but I’d like to think we’ve started a winning streak here.

I was told two rules about editors when I joined BusinessWeek:

1. If any of them actually knew what they were doing, they would be millionaires from playing the stock market.
2. By the time something reaches the cover of BusinessWeek, it has already peaked and it’s on the way down.
   

Of course, both of those rules were relayed to me by grumpy editorial technology team members who spent their days and nights helping editors figure out why their XyWrite files wouldn’t print.

I was thinking about those rules when I read a story about the SEC nailing a group of insider traders. Some of them had used their roles in the printing plant to read BusinessWeek’s “Inside Wall Street” column as it was being printed and pass on information to family members to make money buying and selling stocks.

Wow, I hadn’t thought about the Inside Wall Street column for years, but I remember back when I worked at Business Week that only a handful of people were allowed access to the contents until after Wednesday night when the issue was closed. When I first heard about those restrictions, I was told that it was overkill.

But these insider traders made close to $7 million with their scheme, so I guess these BusinessWeek editors know something valuable after all!

We got Jack a new betta fish today. I wanted to name him either “Finn Again” or “Finnn” with three n’s. Each new fish would just add another “n.”

When Jack said he wanted “to call him Finn again,” I couldn’t resist mentioning my idea for his name.

So his nickname is Finn, but his full name is Finn Again.

Jack and I were heading off somewhere and I asked him to go give Niki a kiss. So he blew her a kiss.

I wanted to make him actually go over to her to say goodbye so I told him he needed to give her a hug.

He crossed his arms and blew into the air again. He sort of looked like a genie granting a wish.

I asked him what he was doing and he said, “I am blowing Mama a hug.”

I want to be clever like a three-year-old again.

I read two stories about the physics of superheroes last week. One was in National Geographic and it covered some opinions by James Kakalios, professor and author of “The Physics of Superheroes”. One of the things he says is “As any fan knows, the original explanation for Big Blue’s power and skyscraping leaps was gravity. He comes, the story goes, from the destroyed planet Krypton, where gravity was stronger than it is on Earth.”

I remember that explanation. His point is that Clark Kent should be bouncing around The Daily Planet offices like Neil Armstrong did on the moon — unable to control his floating. Like Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns didn’t have enough of those accusations to deal with.

Of course, that’s not the explanation anyone gives anymore. Decreased gravity wouldn’t give Superman heat vision. The difference is Earth’s yellow sun versus Krypton’s red one. That doesn’t explain why he was returning from going to visit his destroyed home planet in between Superman II and Superman Returns. Why would he want to sit under a red sun, surrounded by Kryptonite?

This other article has a few more entertaining related theories and stories in it, especially the book “Great Mambo Chicken” — “which tells of a scientific experiment in which a researcher put several chickens in a centrifuge and raised them in twice-normal gravity for months at a time. When they emerged, the chickens were stronger and had larger bones and muscles, and greater endurance. In other words, they were superchickens.”

Again with the gravity thing, but at least this one has real-world superchickens.

My favorite superhero physics question was from John Byrne about the Invisible Woman a long time ago. Supposedly she turns herself and other objects invisible by bending light rays around them. If the only light bulb in the room is on and she turns it invisible, does the room go dark?

Then you’re part of the precipitate.

Niki makes an awesome chicken paprikash. She learned it years ago when she was dating a Hungarian guy and she used to even make the noodles — the spaetzle — by hand. She’d make her own batter and grind it though a spaetzle maker and it would take hours. These days with two kids she uses farfalle — bow tie or butterfly pasta. It holds the sauce well and cuts the cooking time by two thirds I’m sure.

I used to tell her how awesome the meal is and how it’s just like my mom used to make when I was a kid. Of course, I’m not the Hungarian boyfriend, so I never ate chicken paprikash until I met Niki. I always got a kick out of that.

I have chicken paprikash on the brain because she made it last night and we had it again for lunch. It’s one dish that actually gets better sitting in the refrigerator waiting to become leftovers.

Years ago when I came home from college, I got into a basketball arcade game called Run & Gun. It had two big screens, five-man teams and you could play two against two facing each other. Konami didn’t have licensing from the NBA, so they had teams like Chicago and Salt Lake City and the players looked familiar, but they weren’t allowed to call them Michael Jordan, Karl Malone or Magic Johnson.

Walter and I pumped a lot of quarters into that game. He was usually Los Angeles and I was Salt Lake City. Since this was an NBA rip-off I decided that my Mailman should be called The Milkman and I’d shout “The Milkman delivers!” when he’d finish an alley-oop dunk or “The Milkman rings twice!” when he’d make another great play. In 1997 and 1998 when the Jazz played the Bulls in the NBA Finals, I was a Jazz fan and much of that was tied into how much fun I had with Walter on that arcade game.

Watching the Dallas Mavericks sneak by the Jazz in a five-game series in 2001 was depressing for a Jazz fan, but I got to watch an exciting new Western Conference powerhouse up close. I went to college in Fort Worth and worked in and around Dallas and saw probably 50 concerts at Reunion Arena — now the American Airlines Center — so following the new Mavericks wasn’t difficult. Of course when I lived in Texas the Mavericks were on the decline and even the Dallas Cowboys had an embarrassing 1-15 season.

Stockton retired. Malone spent a single season looking for a championship ring with the Lakers that looked great on paper but ended with a surprising exit at the hands of the Pistons. Malone retired.

There was no real reason to follow the Jazz anymore, but plenty of reasons to watch a winning Mavericks team. Mark Cuban has been blogging in my Blogsmith system, I got to meet Dirk Nowitzki at the All-Star game in Denver last year and I have gone from wanting to see the Jazz get a championship to wanting to see the Mavericks get one.

Their game seven overtime win in San Antonio was tremendous and even Steve Kerr wrote “The transformation of Dallas from a free-wheeling, jump-shooting finesse team to true championship contender is complete.”

If Dallas goes all the way, they might have this year’s screwed up playoff system to thank. By playing the Spurs in the second round they have already defeated their rightful third round opponent and their actual third round could be an easier one right before the Finals. We’ll find out.

We have another one of those CodeJams coming up soon and the pressure is on me to make it as interesting as our last one.

This weekend Niki and I caught up on three episodes of Alias and three Sopranos. During one Alias they showed the Santa Monica pier, so I pointed out how we stayed nearby for our last CodeJam and some of the landmarks like the Pacific Coast Highway.

Then during Christopher’s trip to LA on the Sopranos, he stayed at our CodeJam hotel, the Viceroy. I showed Niki the lobby (where we saw Michelle Rodriguez from Lost doing an EW photo shoot), the bar, the pools (where we watched CSI: Miami shoot a scene one morning), the elevators where they hassle Ben Kingsley and the hotel room where Christopher does lines of coke with a prostitute. It was just like reliving our L.A. trip.

Business Week’s Jon Fine has the Viceroy on his list of product placements on The Sopranos so far this season. He comments that the Viceroy is “beachside” as long as by beachside you mean “across the street from the beach”. “Across a busy street and one long long block away from beachside” just doesn’t sound the same, does it?

I’m not sure I am going to be able to find us similar Hollywood-level excitement in Westchester.

Maybe we’ll just build some interesting stuff, get to know our two new team members and eat well. I’ll let you know if we do anything interesting.