Welcome to my petshop...

You gotta be shitting me. While reading the hillarity of Ridley Scott's Monopoly Movie Is About Parallel Universes, I continued to this...

>> [Assistant to Ridley Scott and scriptwriter Frank] Beddor said his inspiration came from [Lewis] Carroll
>> and the "Looking Glass Wars" experience: "They have this big world and this game -- it’s the most
>> famous board game in the world -- and it just really came out of the whole 'Alice' thing. I took the
>> approach of thinking of the main character falling down a rabbit hole and into a real place called
>> Monopoly City ... It was the re-engineering of 'Alice in Wonderland' that got me thinking and then with
>> this it came around full circle and I was able to utilize that. That’s a big world. They were searching for
>> that."

No, they weren't. You're stupid. Shut the fuck up, idiot. I'm going to file you alongside the dumbshit that thinks there's a story in Asteroids.

Thinking about this foolishness actually being attempted is making my head hurt. I do believe I'll be suing for damages if this actually becomes reality.

I did. Dad said thanks. That was cool.

Also of note today, I almost got assassinated on the way home.

( The boy that lived )

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.

You can ask my parents and they'll tell you the same thing: I have never ever liked Halloween. From childhood distaste to adult tragedy, my feelings on October 31st have always been negative. Haven't ever really been a fan of horror movies, either, although the right ones can strike a chord in me. Anyway, point of this entry is an article on io9 called Scare Fail, and it likewise strikes that chord.

>> A horror movie that fails to make you scared is worse than bad. There's
>> something embarrassing about watching it, akin to the feeling of having
>> to turn down the advances of a well-meaning but unsexy friend.

HA classic! Here's the rundown on Annalee Newitz's five essential elements of scare fail...

( Abandon hope, ye who enter! )

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.

---

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