There was a touching moment at breakfast the other day when I explained to Jack how we love his cousins and we’re good to them, but not to worry because we love him and Victor more and that all parents love their own kids the most.
I asked him if he understood what I meant and he replied, “If you spray water on my feet under the table, then my magic dogs will appear.”
I think I’m really getting through to him.
We lost a great cat yesterday, the best black cat that ever crossed my path.
Hah, he would have gotten a kick out of that. He loved my puns. All of our pets do, but Jordan had a real soft spot for them.
Jordan was 16. He lived a good, long life. He wasn’t thrilled with the additions of three dogs, another cat and two baby boys, but he remained a blue ribbon cuddler and didn’t fear the brush like some other pets I know.
Victor was born on September 12, one year ago. That’s month 9, day 12.
We went to the Yankees game last night. They scored 9 runs in the first inning and they added three more for an even 12 in their rout.
In the middle of the sixth inning, they flashed a happy birthday message to Victor. What time was on the scoreboard? 9:12pm, of course.
“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:
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.
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