Friday, July 08, 2005

Just Weird Crap I Want to Unload

1.) My sister, brother-in-law and niece are fine. They did not die in an explosion in London - they were closer to the edge of the city. This is good. Sure, they let us stew for 28 hours or so before letting us know, but at least I don't have to inherit their poodle.

2.) David Neiwert (at Orcinus) actually published an excerpt from my review of his book Strawberry Days. That's even cooler than finding out my blog is listed at the top of the MNSpeak aggregator list (through sheer chance - it's alphabetical. If I had just been "Nod to Nothing", I'd have been much further down).

3.) It seems to me that there's something very wrong about taking your daughter to the NickJr. site to play Dora the Explorer's "Big City Adventure" only to have Dora and her Mami get their tires jacked by Swiper the Fox.

4.) There's a rabbit my wife often sees running around the neighborhood who has a tumorous growth. She refers to him as "cancer bunny". A search of +cancer +rabbit on Google doesn't really seem to turn up anything comparable. She's recently discovered that cancer bunny lives in my co-workers ex-husband's yard (he moved in two down) while watering his yard for him.

5.) Go Lance!

6.) I'd like to summarize my day: "When faced with a quad processor 2.7 ghz Xeon Pentium Biztalk 2004 box, one should remember that given the default installation settings, the High Watermark value of 200 actually translates into 200 memory-resident messages per CPU and that the hyperthreading of the Xeon processor actually doubles the watermark level, resulting in 200x4x2, or 1600 memory-resident messages. A savvy BTS programmer will note that she/he should multiply the high end of their average (XML) message size by 1600 to get a firm idea of how much memory that BTS host will consume, keeping in mind that even if it runs above a gig and a half, 32 bit Windows systems will typically max out around 1.5-2 gigs. Remember that this is above the memory used to operate the system generally, and possibly above the memory used to run orchestrations if you instantiate those orchestrations on a separate host instance." Just between you and me, a History/English undergrad and Writing Master's don't prepare you at all for that sort of workday.

2 comments:

BiggTree said...

Go easy on the folks from bullet #1. I made the same mistake during the Russian coup attempt in the fall of 1993. If you recall, American news had lots of footage of Russian Army tanks firing upon the Russian Parliament(Duma) in Moscow. As I was in St. Petersburg, and hadn't enlisted in either the Russian Army or Duma, it took me three days to figure out that my parents might be worried. Apparently, they had been frantically trying to call but all the phone lines were jammed. Of course, in England it was regular folks that were attacked. Your relatives have always struck me as regular folks, so I can understand your concern. Given the state of general chaos I think 28 hrs is a reasonable response time.

Joe said...

1. Good to hear they're ok.

6. I like cupcakes.