DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I thought P*B’s DSL network was puking again. I could get online, but only just. All my remote connections were in slow-motion.

Normally I just reboot my DSL hardware. This time, I didn’t, because the problem appeared to be in Pac Bell’s network. I was getting 2-second ping times as soon as I got past my own router.

The P*B tech suggested, to no one’s surprise, that I reboot the DSL hardware. I did — it didn’t help. I unplugged my switch… no joy. I unplugged my webserver… and suddenly the line cleared. Immediately, ping times dropped to their normal, 10-ms range.

“So there’s something wrong with your server,” the P*B tech said. “Are you running NT?”

Err, no.

I scanned some processes and didn’t see anything amiss. It didn’t occur to me to check my bandwidth graphs until much later. Finally I realized that one of the websites I host was getting about 10x as much traffic as normal. The site offers street maps of popular travel destinations.

Referer info wasn’t helpful; many users were clicking through from Yahoo, to view maps of Manhattan. But that Yahoo placement has been there for a year…. why would it suddenly begin generating so much traffic? Why are so many people suddenly interested in maps of Manhattan?

It was at this point that a coworker told me via IRC to check the news, that an apparent terrorist attack had taken down both the towers of the World Trade Center.

The New York Times put it into perspective: this is the Pearl Harbor of our generation. Forty years from now we’ll be talking about where we were when we learned of this attack. I feel trivial and misguided to have been wrestling with webserver bandwidth at a time when hundreds of thousands of lives were altered, or ended, by this tragedy. My thoughts and prayers go out to those people.

I’ve begun using PNG images rather than JPEGs and GIFs on this site. For large, full-color continuous-tone images (such as photographs), PNGs are larger than JPEGs, but have a number of advantages over JPEG, including the fact that image quality is superior (not that any of my images are that great to begin with).

I found a great tool for compressing PNGs. It runs under a variety of OSes and provides an easy way to make PNGs smaller. Because it is a command-line utility, you can quickly process entire directories at once — without all the tedious opening and saving as with a GUI.

On my images it provided a savings of about 8% on large images, and nearly 20% on small images, as compared to PNGs created by Photoshop 6.

The utility is called pngcrush.

We returned home from a morning walk around the neighborhood to find a bag of tomatoes on the front porch. This disproves what I said last week about people having so much produce they can’t give it away — clearly, you can give it away, so long as you leave it on someone’s porch when they aren’t home.

I’m being facetious, of course. My neighbors grow several varieties we don’t, so I’ve been gratefully snacking on tomatoes all day. As a neighborly gesture, I brought them a sack of avacadoes from my Amazing Avacado Sculpture and learned that they’ve been admiring my avocado tree all summer. I had a vision of them sitting in the hot tub, staring up at the avocado tree, coveting my fruit so to speak.

I brought my other neighbors a similar sack of avacadoes and a fresh loaf of sesame-seed sourdough, as a thanks for the tomatoes they didn’t leave on my porch. (I really wish people would leave notes with gifts.)

Earlier this summer I set two strength-training goals for myself. I wanted to bench my body weight, and I wanted to do 10 bar-dips.

The bar-dip goal came and went months ago, just a few weeks after I began training. I briefly considered going for Larry Ellison’s record… but ultimately decided that 12-15 bar dips is all anyone really needs to be able to do.

The bench-press goal has been harder to meet. I’m no longer sure this is even a worthwhile goal — big muscles get in the way of drumming — so you can imagine how dumb I felt this morning when I pinned myself to the bench under 150 lbs of weight.

“One more rep,” I’d thought in a personal Unbreakable moment, “I can do one more!” Ooh, I was wrong. Shoulda had someone spot me.

The thing about my health club is that most of the patrons are a lot older than me. Minus the occasional high-school football player, I am generally the youngest person there, and one of a very small handful who ever uses the bench press. Therefore the room where the freeweights are located is seldom used except by people passing through to the weird contraptions beyond, like the “glute blaster” machine that I always think should be called “All Ass” — so I had a few minutes to contemplate my predicament while I waited for someone to help me.

I wasn’t embarrassed to be stuck. I wasn’t in pain. But I sure as hell couldn’t lift the bar off my chest. I couldn’t even relax my arms, because letting go of the bar would have allowed it to tip off to one side, setting off a chain reaction of weights flying and bar flipping that could have really hurt someone, e.g. me.

Presently someone entered the room. I called, “Excuse me, sir?” He looked around with some alarm; I think he hadn’t noticed me there. He rushed over to help, assuming I was panicked I guess. He grabbed the bar and, from a terribly awkward position — imbalanced, with no leverage — began lifting. I pushed as hard as I could. Between the two of us we barely managed to rack the bar. That was actually scarier than being pinned; if my Samaritan’s arms had given out, I’d have had no strength left to prevent the bar from crashing back down onto my chest.

Then the guy turned around and took off, either in a great rush to work his ass, or embarrassed for my sake. Probably the latter. I now wish I’d stopped him to thank him formally instead of letting that awkward moment stretch out. I also wish I’d had the foresight to suggest that he take some of the plates off the bar, rather than just trying to lift it.

(Epilogue: A few weeks later, I ran into the guy who had helped me, and thanked him. I was happy to hear he had not hurt himself. I suggested that we’d have been smarter to unload the bar rather than trying to lift it; now both of us will carry around that near-useless piece of information forever, on the extremely slim chance that either one of us is ever in a position to help someone, or be helped, out from under a barbell.)

I overindulged in guacamole a month ago. I now have an aversion to it, reinforced by that deep kinesthetic memory of gastrointestinal distress. But I still have an avocado tree in my yard, and it’s still producing, even though I haven’t been up in the tree in weeks. In retaliation it has taken to dropping half-pound bombs on the patio. We find exploded avocados around the yard daily — I’m afraid to sit under it, for fear of getting brained.

Today I relented. Up the ladder I went, with my custom avocado picker (a plastic coffee mug duct-taped to a 10'-long 1''x2''). I just took the fruit that was easy to see, and easy to reach — my wife stopped me after #13. I’d picked 10 lbs of avocados! The giant of the lot was nearly a pound by itself.

I guess this is typical of late summer and fall in this region. Most folks have so much produce, they can’t give it away.