The ins and outs of Yvo’s life.
January 29th, 2007 Yvo
It’s a day that the average system administrator doesn’t look forward to… server problems. Today was one of those for me. Started out as a typical Monday morning when suddenly my cell phone vibrated and my email alerts on my screen were going off… it was our monitoring system letting me know about a sudden increase in Oracle connections on our application servers. Taking a look it had gone up from 1200 connections per machine to 2400 in a matter of minutes. I alert some people and the proper course was to restart Apache. All the while people that are supposed to be watching for this had no idea. I restarted Apache on the application servers and at this point no DB connections were being made. I made contact with the db admins in iowa and they suddenly received pages. Apparently the Oracle listener had failed. A quick restart and we were online… or so we thought.
Fast forward 2 hours and bam same problem, Oracle connections on the rise (this time almost hitting 3000 on each machine). I immediately alerted the db admins (who again didn’t receive pages from their monitoring system) and this time it was found that one of the CPUs had died on the machine and it was spitting out memory errors. Ten minutes of downtime and we were up… for good.
Lesson learned… a good monitoring system can prevent a lot of stress. I was able to alert all the necessary people before it exploded in my face. Its embarrasing to hear that your website is down from either a customer or even someone in the office. It feels nice to say “Already know about it and working on it” and also letting customer support know about the issue so they don’t look like dumbos. At a previous employment this was never the case, i felt like the db admins did today… as in it was never known until a customer reported in that something broke.
Below… a nice overview of what happened. I highly click on it and you can see for yourself.
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January 28th, 2007 Yvo
I know winter is only a month in but I sure hope I see the last of the white stuff other then in the mountains. I don’t mind snow other then the morons driving in it, in fact I love the snow. It completely brings the inner child out of me. I just don’t like the side effects of the snow as in the aforementioned bad drivers and chemicals they put on the road.
It is partially my fault that I got these scars. The days after the snow storm I went right back to my old rhythm, as in go 65 - 70mph on the freeway wherever possible. On my way to Canada two weeks ago I did the same, sometimes going 75 (I did manage to do Renton to Vancouver in just under 2 and half hours though).
Gave my car a nice hand washed bath today and waxed, de-waxed, waxed and de-waxed again and discovered these:
My own speeding and crappy chemicals to thank for. Contacted some company called Sprayless Scratch Repair in the Seattle area hopefully they can do something.
Yvo
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January 23rd, 2007 Yvo
I’ve been reading Autoblog lately and while there are plenty of Toyota haters (but probably just as many Ford haters) on that blog, its an interesting read. Last week news broke of this terrible event that happened to a disabled man and a car dealership. Car dealership’s employees (11 total) took 100,000 from a disabled man. That is just completely sickening. No excuses.
This would mark the 2nd story I’ve sent to them (first one was a major Scion recall, how appropriate I suppose).
Read all about it:
http://www.autoblog.com/2007/01/23/seattle-dealership-rips-off-disabled-man/
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January 23rd, 2007 Yvo
The early adopter within me has spoken again tonight. I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 (yay it auto saves drafts now, just like gmail!) six hours after it was released. Pretty smooth upgrade. Have to find all my plugins again but nothing serious. In my personal life I am quite the early adopter and sometimes can be professionally but recently I’ve learned (without burning myself, yay!) to slow down a little. It does help that I have a test environment that reflects the personal environment so I can experiment in the office without causing major damage. Thats probably why the apache 1.3 migration to apache 2.0/2.2 migration was so easy and painless :-).
Knowing me… I’ll probably buy Leopard the night it comes out. Yeah I know.. I’m sad.
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January 11th, 2007 Yvo
Last year when I worked for my previous employer I was looking into mail server replacements. During this period a colleague jokingly said that Google was accepting applications to have your personal (or company) domain’s email and calendar functions through Google, coined “Google Apps for Your Domain” and that we should just switch everyone over to that. At the time I signed up and never heard anything until last week.
Apparently my application was accepted. Today I finally went ahead and activated my account, changed my MX records and added some CNAMEs to my zone file at dnsexit.com.
It basically is gmail, calendar and chat for your domain. Having seen that no one has really reviewed this (at least not on digg), I might write a small review in the future. If I am up to it.
So as of this moment all @disgruntled-dutch.com email is being handled by Google.
Yvo
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January 9th, 2007 Yvo
This week is Macworld 2007, an event where people from various industries gather to talk Mac held in San Francisco. It also features a keynote by Apple themselves often releasing new products (the two prior keynotes have seen new iLife releases for example and last year the intel iMac and Macbook Pro were announced). This year was no different, another keynote presented by Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs.
Rumor mills often predict what is coming, some even creating bingo cards listing the possible rumors. This year Apple announced the Apple TV and Apple iPhone. That’s it. Nothing else. Literally a 2 hour keynote talking about 2 products. Well in all honesty, the break down was this:
Sales recap - 20 minutes
Apple TV - 15 minutes
Apple phone - 80 minutes
John Mayer - 5 minutes
So no new iLife, iWork, Mac Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, Leopard release date, high def iTunes audio or video, or an update from Adobe concerning universal binaries. How utterly disappointing. Two hours wasted on products that were more suited to be shown at CES as these two products were exactly that… Consumer Electronics. Great so now I can stream music & sound from an Apple branded streamer (something my Tivo already does and it also comes with a lot more for the same price) and I can have a phone through a terrible provider (Cingular). Oh wait… nothing is shipping yet. The Apple TV doesn’t ship until Feb/March and the phone hopefully (knowing the FCC) ships in June.
Last time I checked this conference was called MACworld, where are the Mac related products. Where is Adobe showing off Photoshop CS3 and Illustrator CS3? Where is Leopard? Intel released new Xeon workstation CPUs last week, where are the 8-way Mac Pros? Nope instead Apple Computer drops the Computer and becomes “Apple, Inc.” Personally Apple should just rename Macworld to Appleworld because they are trying very hard to become the “iPod company” instead of making computers.
Ok… I’m done complaining for the day.
Yvo
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January 7th, 2007 Yvo
So I’m a week late, but I figure better late then never. 2006 was an interesting year. Nothing big like 2005 where I bought a condo and moved in with my girlfriend, but still a mighty interesting year. A resounding theme throughout the entire year was to take risks and cut your losses.
Last year saw the start of yet another new employment after what can be called a dramatic ending to my previous employment. A good summary of those events can lead to a combination of two words: “Shit happens”. After dabbling with my feelings for a good month I was presented an opportunity where the resounding theme came into play. I cut my losses and soldiered forward. While working for “The Man” can suck sometimes and you have to deal with a lot of corporate tape (in my words boohaha), I’ve never felt this happy or secure employment wise.
What else did I do in 2006? Well I decided to adopt a dying dog (at the time) or a diamond in the rough (fits with my personality might I say). After some big vet bills the dog is doing tremendously well and I feel proud knowing that I saved the life of another being. In September I decided to finally get rid of my family sedan aka the Mazda 626. After only being on craigslist for 3 days I sold the car to a 16 year old girl and her overly cautious dad. I bet if I run the VIN 2 years from now through Carfax it’ll be marked as a totaled vehicle. My replacement vehicle? A brand new Scion tC.
Finally I also managed to pay some of my negative debt off this year, which leads me to my resolutions for this year. Other then the usual “Lose 20 lbs and turn it into muscle resolution” I also plan to have completely paid off negative (as in collection type) debt by the end of the year. Personally its just another step towards improving my life and I know I can do it.
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January 1st, 2007 Yvo
So after seeing many flashy commercials about Mor Furniture, Cam and I gave it shot. They had the equal monthly payments, no minimum down, no interest until 2011 special going on until end of day today. Figure that we can easily pay for nice $2000 furniture for 48 months (most likely we’ll do it in less then half that time) we went for it.
So $2200 later, we bought a dining table (which has a leaf to make it bigger), 4 chairs, 2 arm chairs, a buffet, a hutch and a big red rug for our new coffee table we got last week in our living room. Finally I can give my funky weird glasses I collect a nice place! Downside is that it has to be ordered directly from the manufacturer so it may take up to 12 weeks.
Pics at Mor Furniture in all its glory.
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