After a string of BV days, today is at least a balance of both good and bad.

I slept late last night because I was trying out our new DSL connection by watching videos of the Shakey's V-league and this resulted into me trying to drive while half asleep. Scary... I would suddenly find myself too near the car in front of me and good thing I didn't hit any thing. I crammed the part-time load for processing by Gina and Ms. Marivi and saw some changes that still need to be made. Haay.. tomorrow na lang yung final changes...

Then, I had a chance to see some people I've missed this past few weeks. Haha.. and not just one, but two.. (Elle and someone else). Good day to some extent. Went to the bank to purge my debts and deposit my earnings... then had a good time just walking around Ateneo. Saw some old students (Health Sci, Bio, and others...) had a chat with a few friends.. then went on and bummed for a few hours.. 

Haha. and now, I think I need to do something but I don't remember what... Shucks.. what if it is important.. I got to remember! Nooo..haha sorry I'm sabog na. 

-Joe

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Hi! Just a short entry for some (shameless) plugging (and God I missed doing this):

I have two stories now up on two publications this week.

The first is "Fifty-Five Percent", a light romantic science fiction flash story, now up on Everyday Fiction.



The second is "The Coming of the Anak-Araw", a fantasy story set in a world based on pre-Hispanic Philippines, is now published in the first issue of Usok, the new online Philippine speculative fiction magazine by touyatouya's new imprint, Rocket Kapre. The story's actually part of the same series of stories as "The Storyteller and the Giant", and the novel in my head that I could never get around to writing, sigh.

Comments on both stories would be very much loved! :D

I've been busy (well, you've heard that before), being constantly on duty at the hospital and all, but since I finally get a holiday (even if it's only for one day), I thought I should at least update this long-forgotten journal. Besides, it's that time of the year--no, not Christmas.

I mean Halloween, and All Souls' Day. And yes, that means--ghost stories!

I was on skeleton duty (meaning, only the people assigned to be on duty were required to go to the hospital) last Halloween due to the storm. I was initially really annoyed at that, because I like to stay at home on Halloween and watch horror movies (or those horror specials on TV, like the ones on the old Magandang Gabi Bayan or Rated K). But then I realized that hospitals are inherently scary places, and this was an opportunity to go ghost-hunting.

And find those ghosts I did. I didn't have to go very far, even...apparently there were three ghosts in the Surgery ward. And I was rotating there.

( On skeleton duty with ghosts, whoo )

There were probably more stories, but this was all I heard (or, those I could stand to hear). That entire night I was completely edgy, jumping at little shadows. The funny thing was, we relayed the stories to one of our residents, and he was annoyed at us because he was going to be alone in the staff room all night. And when I came to the room to have something checked, I noticed that their TV was on full blast, and no one was watching--and he admitted that he kept it on so he wouldn't have to be alone in eerie silence. LOL.

And that's all the ghost stories I have for now. For now, to satisfy my need for horror, I shall be watching Harper's Island, which isn't the most well-made series in the world, and is actually like any slasher flick, but still has strangely addicted. (It's probably Christopher Gorham and CJ Thomason? *cough*) I was a bit disappointed with the recent horror film I watched, Jelangkung, or, Haunted Doll. Any recommendations?

Tomorrow, I go back to the ward and face the residents again--actually a thought more horrifying than seeing any ghost. *gulp*

***

Some shout-outs:

lilacfield: I got your postcard, doujin, and novel! Thank you so much! :) Will be sending something this week.
manghahabi: Will be sending something to you too. :)

EDIT: If you're reading this, our maintenance is OVER! The problem was not found on our equipment, which means we'll have to work with our ISP to fix this small problem -- which also means another maintenance window in the future -- but at least we have eliminated our side.

Thank you everyone, and a special shout out to rekoil for giving me a great suggestion AND also the opportunity to feel like I've just called in to a local radio station.

Have a great day, night or afternoon wherever you may be.

---

Hi everyone, sorry for the late notice but I'm going to have to do some testing on 1 of our 4 internet circuits TONIGHT; Friday night or Saturday morning depending on which time zone you're in.

Most of us shouldn't notice any impact, though there may be some slowness or lag when I switch traffic on to our other ISP circuits and then another hit when I stop the tests. If a page won't load or times out, try hitting refresh 1 or 2 times and it should load then. If it doesn't work at all... trust me, I'll be typing really really really fast to try to undo whatever I just did. Hopefully you'll have some Halloween candy (if you're in the USA and celebrate that kind of thing) nearby to take away the bitterness of a small site outage. :(

Here's the handy-dandy Website That I Always Use to get a feel for when the maintenance will start in your area. Our site traffic historically dips on Friday afternoons until Saturday morning which is why we tend to pick this time for maintenance work.

( tech details )

status.livejournal.org will, of course be updated before and after the maintenance window. Or else marta will get mad at me. :D

bt