DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

One of the things I do to keep the lights on is help run a busy consumer website. The site sees awesome, unreal spikes in traffic around the holidays. (Hint: it ain’t debris.com.) Traffic doubled on the night before Valentine’s Day, from our normal daily peak of about 4 Mb/sec to over 9 Mb/sec, causing some strain on our server network — the webservers would back up under the deluge of pending connections, and finally succumb to the load and die. If we caught them in time, they’d recover; if not, we’d have to send someone to the colo facility and kickstart them. We did some of each as we learned what the limits are. This hardware had never been pushed so hard.

Traffic declined after 11pm, but began to climb again early on Valentine’s Day. By 6am most of my team were glued to their seats, watching in disbelief as the MRTG graph showed our traffic climb past 15 Mb/sec, past 20 Mb/sec, to finally peak north of 27 Mb/sec. Imagine that: the site’s traffic had grown 700%.

We brought additional hardware online to help handle the torrent, but we still had occasional problems with webserver suicides. I drove the load-balancer for much of the morning, manually pulling a machine out of the server array when I saw it approaching redline. Of course, pulling a server offline causes the load on the rest to climb, in compensation for the lost machine, so this became a sort of dance, attempting to mete the load in the face of accelerating growth in page requests.

But we pulled it off. It was exhilarating. I commented at one point that I felt, while manually load-balancing traffic for multiple websites across nine servers of vastly different capacities, like I was conducting a symphony. A co-worker responded wryly that “herding cats” was a more accurate description.

I was flying home from Germany in January when I saw a passenger vomit all over the person sitting next to him. It was awful to hear the cough, the gurgling, the splash, and the horrified gasp of everyone in the vicinity. And it was worse to be trapped 10' away, breathing what I imagined to be Ebola Frankfurt, an airborne filovirus that would cause everyone on the plane to erupt into bloody geysers of sausage-smelling dissolved organs 72 hours later.

All the passengers around me were heartless weasels. They regarded the sick person like the latest in on-board entertainment… They stared, openly gaping at his misery. I glared at some of them, not that they could peel their eyes away long enough to notice.

Anyway, I mention this to put things into perspective. I’ve been sick for a week: headaches, congestion, a mystery nosebleed, and a wracking dry cough that appears at bedtime, like a phone call from a neurotic ex-girlfriend, to torment me and make sleep impossible.

But, as bad as I feel, at least I haven’t barfed on anyone.

By the way, the thing on the aiplane turned out not to be Ebola after all.

So I’m standing in the kitchen, making some sort of macrobiotic vegan meal with the recommended balance of Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids and all 9 essential amino acids — ok, just kidding, I was waiting for a frozen burrito to heat up — when I hear an electronic chirp sound from down the hall. I don’t keep birds, especially battery-powered birds, so the sound must have come from a smoke alarm.

On my way down the hall, I hear the sound again, coming from inside my office. Inside, I step up on the chair and twist the alarm down from the ceiling. It chirps again, loudly, and I nearly topple over in surprise. I recover my balance, step down, and pull the battery out of the back of the unit.

Returning to the kitchen, I’m checking on the state of the frozen block of pureed vegetable goo in the center of my entree, and I hear a chirp sound from down the hall. I pause, considering my options. Without moving my head, I slowly scan the room with my eyes: Who’s fucking with me this time?

Back in the office, I double-check the alarm I’ve just eviscerated. The battery really is disconnected. I put it back in. The alarm chirps at me, loudly. I take out the battery. Then I hear a chirp from the hallway — ahh, the other alarm. What are the odds that both alarms would die within minutes of each other?

I resolve not to repeat my grab-and-spin dance to retrieve the second alarm until after dinner. And I retire to the lanai for a refreshing meal, except for the cold part in the middle.

Later that evening, I relate the above story to my wife, and, reminded of the unfinished business, arrange a stool and climb up to check on the remaining alarm. I flip open the cover to face an unexpected surprise: the battery is disconnected. A centimeter of air separates the battery from the terminals. I don’t see any tiny 9V sparks bridging the gap.

“That can’t be right,” I say stupidly as I push the battery forward in its track until it makes contact. The alarm responds with a full-throttle shriek, as if, just before connecting the battery, I’d set fire to my hair. In surprise, I nearly topple from the stool, but recover (with surprising grace), to immediately document the event upon this website, along with the question: Which one of you is doing this?

Human Cannonball Misses Target [CNN video]

More, from the Miami Herald: Family members said he overshot an inflatable cushion by 25 feet, landed on his feet and then, carried by his momentum, crashed headfirst into a temporary fence made of fiberglass.

Update! New evidence suggests the cannonball actually landed on his head.

I was just telling my wife about a song on “side one” of the new Dream Theater “album,” which is in actuality a 2-CD recording that has no “sides” at all. I have to laugh — not only do I still own vinyl; I still think vinyl.