A gray November day at High Point State Park in NJ. Wasn't really dressed warm enough but the scenery and views were worth the trip. A nice day out for DH and I. We also stopped at Layfette Village, a quiet Chinese buffet in Byram and found a neat thrift shop in Newton where we got a Battleship game for Alan whom we missed. If you click into the picture in flickr you can see some other shots taken today.

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 think that the power of suggestion and good advice influences us - not necessarily the "pull of the planets" and that is why I read horoscopes! :-)



Today's from Yahoo:


November 11, 2009
Libra (9/23-10/22)

Friendships are elective relationships -- they don't always have to be lifelong commitments. People change over time, and unfortunately, they don't always grow in the same direction. You're having issues with a certain someone and you're wondering what you ever saw in this person. You can accept who he or she is becoming, but you don't have to keep them in your life if they're not enriching it. There is nothing wrong with moving on.


Very, very true, no?

I stumbled upon this link the other day:

Night of a 1000 drawings

They are collecting small art works by anyone, at whatever level of skill, to sell in order to benefit some or other charity. So why not get a bit of experience while benefiting the poor and downtrodden? Here is what I came up with; it was fairly loosely done from a photo I recently took of jacarandas in bloom in a street near here. This time of year, all of Pretoria is purple with jacaranda blooms. The sketch is A5 size, as they requested, in pen and ink with watercolour:

I've cooked, eaten and cleaned up dinner. Everything that needs to be done for tomorrow is done. I'm on the couch watching So You Think You Can Dance so all is good with the world.

I've been reading the New York Times online which has turned out to be a real mistake. The news is sad. The news is annoying. The news is frustrating. The news is draining me of my will to live. And I'm not sure of anything. It's hard to know what really sucks, and what is just more complexity based on information that I don't have. Being a well informed grown-up is really not what's it's cracked up to be. And do I really need to know anything more then the latest Grey's Anatomy spoilers? No, I didn't think so.

Soon to be time for bed! Goodnight all!

A Science Spin is a Hole-in-One in New York Hall of Science Rocket Park Mini Golf

Interesting article from Exhibit Builder about the construction of the course



(Yes, those are real rockets in the background - the New York Hall of Science is at the old NY World's Fair site).

Was kind of blah about my day off. Lots of work, little motivation. We were going to take a bus to AC to hang out, but the deals they offered were just cash to use at the Casino - no lunch, no show, not even real $ you could save and take home.

We talked about going into the city, but I really don't like going there when I'm not working.

Ended up coming up with going to Layfayette Village and High Point State Park. My MIL is coming along also. It will be nice but weird to be child free - Alan has school.

So tommorrow should be ok.

( Touch and Go )

Photo by me (Gregory June)
Model Dear Alice