Cricalix.Net

07:00
Slept for 9 hours last night, and the cold is a bit better. Once I’ve had breakfast, I’ll probably swig a bit more of the Vicks 44D to clear my head. The day before I left for the con, I purchased a nice little flash-based MP3 player, a Samsung YP-U2 2 GB model (link is to the US spec, the foreign spec is a bit different). Tossed about 350 songs on it (and some non-songs like some of Rowan Atkinson’s stories) and put it to one side for the journey. Wednesday morning, while standing in the train station, I patted my pockets, looked in the top compartment of my camera bag, and couldn’t find the blasted thing anywhere. No surprise, I probably left it behind. About 5 hours into my flight, I looked in my shirt pocket (having previously checked the trousers and jacket) and behold, an MP3 player! Now I can’t find it again. I think I may have left it on the sofa downstairs in the hotel lounge, which probably means it’s been nicked. Bugger.

We started the LAN setup last night, which is unheard of for UberCon - we’re normally still setting up the LAN as the doors are opening! So, I give you a pretty picture of the shiny Dell PCs and flatscreens that power our LAN this year. I’ll find out in a short while if the imaging was finished last night after the hockey game or not. If it wasn’t, I’ll have time to slip the EVE client on!
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Woke up bright and early, having spent the night on a medieval torture device that the hotel refers to as a sofa-bed (and the mess the hotel made of the reservation was quite impressive). Not the best sleep of my life, and I’ve slept in some odd places. Meandered downstairs with Chris to find that Kevin, Andrea and a few other folks had rolled in around 5 a.m., so we had company until they went to bed. Andrea managed to sort out the mess with the hotel room, so we now have a room with two doubles and a torture device instead of a king and a torture device.

Went for a walk around 9 to see which shops in the local mall were still around. Looks like the mall is closing down, as a good half of the stores were shuttered and empty. Took a few photos of a butterfly and some seagulls that were infesting the parking lot. Got back to find Dave (who runs the ‘con registration) and girl-friend up and about, so joined them for (a second) breakfast. Quite amusing to see three people sitting at a table, eating breakfast, with laptops out and reading e-mail - a bit like how the movies always portray businessmen with their breakfast and a newspaper. We then retired to the lounge of the hotel to chat, lounge and generally be useless.

Somewhere around noon (no watch, and can’t be bothered to pay attention to the time), we meandered back over to the mall to acquire something referred to as ‘lunch’. It’s apparently good for you if you’re hungry. Watched Scott eat two footlong subs from Subway - he reminds me of my maternal grandfather, slim build and tall. Haven’t got a clue where he puts all the food. Popped into the local grocery store to acquire some Vicks 44D (unavailable in the UK for whatever reason, perhaps the fact that the primary ingredient is alcohol), hot chocolate and granola bars. Due to IBS, I’m avoiding oranges for the moment, which is a pity.

Got back to the hotel and crashed - I’ve somehow acquired what feels like a cold, so a 1 hour nap seemed like a good thing. That 1 hour nap became a 3 hour one, but if that’s what my body wanted, that’s what it wanted. Just finished off a hot chocolate while typing this, and I’ll probably be wandering downstairs to see how the unpacking of the truck went, and how far along the imaging of the gaming systems is. Then I’ll probably collapse back into bed and try for a good 8 or 9 hours of sleep. Con goes live tomorrow at 4 pm, whee!

The keyboard sucks, ’nuff said. Been travelling since 7:15 am, won’t stop until midnight. Isn’t modern travel wonderful? Only modes of transport missed are a boat, rickshaw, bicycle and motorcycle. Perhaps I’ll go to Shanghai one day to use all of the above in one trip!

[Unfortunately, due to the browser on the kiosk being on par with the keyboard, it was impossible to scroll down to hit publish, and there was no alt key! So I'm now posting this from a laptop on the free hotel wireless connection.]

Dove: Evolution

Quicktime movie, showing the evolution of a model from ‘person in the street’ to ‘billboard poster’ in less than 60 seconds, including the Photoshop work. Quite stunning, even after I’ve seen techniques like the ones shown in Greg’s archive (which I saw years ago). Courtesy of BoingBoing.

One of the small pleasures in life for me is finding a good hair salon - one where the stylist can give me a cut that lasts for a month or more, and where the staff are trained in the art of head massages while doing the shampooing. I’ve managed to find one of these places in Newcastle, and I enjoy going there - it’s 30 minutes or so where I can relax, my phone is turned off, and I don’t have to keep the higher functions of my brain engaged to make conversation with the stylist.

Case in point was the hair cut today - if I were a cat, I’d have been purring by the time the young lady finished shampooing my hair. I’m still purring slightly I think, over an hour later.

One of the joys of working for a managed service provider is that we get to talk to way too many system / mail administrators who don’t seem to have the foggiest clue about how things like mail, DNS and the Internet work. Then we get ones who may not have totally thought through what they’re trying to do.

Case in point is a customer that set up a web-based forum. That, in and of itself, is fine. However, they then subscribed every person on the campus to the forum, with the forum set to generate an e-mail to everyone on the subscription list for every post in every thread on the forum. The e-mail scanning server that had to deal with this spew was a P4 with 256 MB of RAM. Suffice to say, it collapsed in a heap, with a queue past 70,000 e-mails inside of 3 hours.

For sake of argument, there are 5000 people subscribed to the forum. 70,000 e-mails in 3 hours is about 6 per second. If the forum receives a posting every minute, the rate goes past 10 per second. A P4 simply won’t handle that kind of load, especially with 256 MB of RAM and IDE disks. We’ll probably suggest that they direct the mail from the forum server right onto their central mail server - I think it’ll probably melt.

The numbers get even worse if the forum gets busy (I know of some forums that handle 10+ postings per second - that’s 50,000 e-mails a second!).

Well, my nice KM 5D is back in my hands, but the repair centre has said they can’t find the fault. Don’t mind that I demonstrated it in the store to the manager, they can’t find it. I’ll be taking the camera to the States anyway when I go across for the ‘con - hopefully I’ll be one of the iconographers for the ‘con (cookie [homemade] for the reference), and the camera will play nice. If it locks up while I’m across, it’s going right back to the repair centre when I get back into the UK. According to the assistant manager at the store, after 4 repair attempts, they have to replace the unit, so we’ll see how things go.