Doug's Home On The Web "Now monochrome monitor compatible!"

As folks noticed on Thursday morning when we opened hotels, the website displayed errors for 5-10 minutes starting at 9 AM EST due to the rush of traffic that came in.  This was due to a few factors, which I'd like to go into in technical detail below.

First, some raw stats:

Peak bandwidth: approx 3.6 Megabits/sec

Peak connections: 1,060 concurrent connections

Number of users logged into the site: 100+

Here are some graphs that show just how big those numbers are, compared to normal traffic levels:

For those who saw last year's post about the load on the webserver when we opened up hotels, this year's traffic was about twice what last year's traffic was.  I didn't see that coming.

As is plainly visible in the traffic graph, the machine that this website runs on is capabale of much higher bandwidth throughput.  So, what happened?

In a word: caching.  Or rather, the lack thereof in certain cases.

I finally did it. I bit the bullet and upgraded my site to Drupal 6. Yes, 6.

I had been meaning to upgrade the website YEARS ago, but a number of factors conspired against me, including:

- Waiting on a Drupal 6 port of Acidfree

- Real life $WORK-related things

- Many many real life commitments.

Be that as it may, the upgrade is finally complete, and my website is now running something just a little more modern. :-) I'll roll out more features to the website in the future, including a brand new commenting system. In the meantime, be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed and/or reach out to me on any of the social networks I'm on.

I'll see you out there.

So I watched Forks Over Knives last night. It's a documentry that talks about the dangers in... not fat, but animal proteins and processed food. It links them to happy fun things such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol.

The takeaways from this:

- It's not fat that's an issue as much as it is eating protein that comes from animals. That's been shown to cause the above mentioned conditions.

- Protein from plants is not a problem.

Well, this year's MFF came and went. And man, did it ever go well. This was one of those conventions for me where everything seemed to go right and fall into place. It was a rare moment at the con when I didn't have something to do or someone to chat with.

As is my tradition with attending conventions, I tend to work them too. This year, I worked in Operations for Puma and his staff. It was a different experience, and overall I enjoyed being in more of an attendee-facing role at this year's MFF.

As I mentioned in a previous comment, Raptor Red was there, in a new version of his fursuit. He was rather expressive, which is normal for him:

The fursuit parade had 574 fursuiters this year:

FurFright went well for me this year.

I don't have much specifically to say, because other than working security, socializing with old friends (and making a few new ones), and catching up on my sleep, I didn't do much else. But that's the kind of convention experience that I'm okay with.

Wanna see the rest of my pictures? They're over here.

Next con for me is Midwest FurFest, which is just around the corner. I'll be working in Operations there (huge surprise, I know). See ya soon!

Here are the hours I'll be on duty at FurFright this weekend:

Friday: 4 PM to 8 PM
Saturday: 8 AM to Noon, 2:30 PM to 4 PM
Sunday: 12 AM to 4 AM, 4 PM to 8 PM

My position is "sergeant", which means I'll be based at the security desk, but walking around a fair bit, checking with people who are working at the various badge checkpoints in case they need to take a bathroom break, doing an occasional rove through the guest floors, etc.

Essentially, if I'm wearing my beret, it means I'm working.

There's not much I can say that hasn't been said already.

The man was an absolute genious.  Bill Gates may have put a computer in every office, but Steve Jobs put a computer in every home and every pocket.  He created products that we didn't even know we needed... until we used them and suddenly realized: "how the hell did I get by without this?"

Desktop publishing? Didn't even exist until the first Macs came out.  Before that, you could get itallics if you were lucky.

Remember when Toy Story came out?  Steve Jobs started Pixar films.

He revolutionized online music distribution with iTunes.  It has since had over 10 billion song downoads.

Apple's market cap surprassed that of every other company in the world.

I live, eat, and breathe technology, and I even learned something from Steve: computers may be technological marvels, but they are still used by humans. And you need to build the software and the hardware accordingly.  It can be done. Steve did it.

Think different. Be different. Live different.

Last weekend was quite fun, as some other furries and myself went to the beach. It was a bit of a remedy for the events of last summer, which included some health issues I was dealing with, as well as someone I who trusted doing something stupid.

I actually didn't drink all that much this weekend, only a beer or two at the hotel and a few drinks at meals (where our servers did shots with us). Instead of destroying myself with alcohol, I instead destroyed myself by bodyboarding for about 8 straight hours on Saturday. The sunburn isn't that bad, but am I ever sore. I'm sore even today, 2 days later.

Anyway, here are some pictures:

The rest of my pictures? They're at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157627496725724/. Enjoy!

This year's Anthrocon went pretty well for me, at least from a staff/Operations standpoint! This being our 6th year in Pittsburgh, things went pretty well. Equipment arrived when it was supposed to, nothing went horribly wrong or got broken, and set up and teardown went fairly well. In that aspect, the con was somewhat "boring" for me, which is actually fantastic.

During my slow days (Friday and Saturday), I actually got to spend some time out enjoying the con, dropped in on a couple of panels, and got some facetime with some folks. My socializing was to such an extent that I didn't even drink all that much, which my wallet had no issues with.

Total stats for this year's Anthrocon were 4,400 furries from 39 countries, 854 fursuits in the fursuit parade, and $11,522 raised for The Toonseum.

Here's a picture of the Toonseum folks (except for the chef, which was Chiaroscuro):

There's not much else for me to add, because the con was more of the same awesomeness that I'm used to experiencing.

Naturally, I have many more photos than are show on in this post The full collection can be found here, with my "main" pictures found here.

Enjoy!

When I got back from Dorsai Thing a few weeks back, I saw a kernel panic on my iMac, so I tried rebooting it. Upon rebooting it, the screen stayed black and no sounds came from the speakers, nor did the Caps Lock light turn on on the keyboard when I pressed the key. So I took the machine out of service and made a note to open it up at some point.

I finally got around to opening up the machine today, and I found what the problem was:

It's quite clear that at least 3 of the capacitors blew out. I'm not clear how this happened, I know that excessive heat can do it but the fans on the system work just fine and there was no excess buildup of dust when I removed the back cover. And I could understand one capacitor failing, but 3 at once? That just doesn't make any sense to me.

Oh well, the machine was old, and served me well for the nearly 6 years that I had it. I'll just stick with my newer machines for now.