daBlog by goddess101

The Happiest Place on Earth

Don’t believe the marketing. Or in the least, Disneyland sure has some tough competition for “the happiest place on earth.”

Waiting for my friend at the arrivals gate yesterday, I realized that where I was standing was perhaps one of the most joyous places I’ve ever been. Couples reuniting, parents visiting children, and people just glad to get off a 15 hour flight—the happy feelings all around are contagious.

I realize this isn’t always the case. As when Rudi and I arrived in Mexico, the flood of tour guides trying to hawk their immenities was downright vulgar. But wow, I once remember coming back from New York, when Ronald and I took a worlwind tour of the East Coast hunting down soap celebrities, my mom was waiting for me at the gate (back when you could actually go to the gate to wait for loved ones!). As I approached her to greet her, she reached out to me, grabbed the back of my head gently, and pulled me down a bit to kiss me on the cheek and give me a big hug. My mom was never one to dole out affection, but I suppose she must have been caught up in the moment of it all too.

Words of Wisdom

Rudi turned me onto this link, Advice on the Choice of a Mistress by Ben Franklin, one of America’s greatest citizens. In this little piece, Ben tells a young man that the best way to tend to his sexual urges is to marry. And not just any woman, but an older woman. It’s a great, refreshing read.

Green Thumbs

One thing I really like about the Dutch is their love for plants, flowers, and all things in that vein. There is this joke from a book called “UnDutchables” (a popular read among expats which examines the Dutch culture from an outsider point of view) which mentions that you will need a machete to hack your way through a Dutchman’s home because of all the foliage you will encounter. This isn’t entirely true, but i’ve seen apartments with, say, 5-10 plants in the living room alone. Garden shops are certainly very popular here too, and its not uncommon to see homegardeners hauling 20 kilo bags of soil on their bikes.

So, I’m reminded of this funny little quirk because of what I encountered at the local grocery store today. They were selling baby apple trees and pear trees, and that struck me as something most Americans probably wouldn’t find at their local Safeway or Ralphs. The thought of loading a box of cereal, a bottle of wine, a bag of M&Ms and—oh why not since I’m short of them this week anyway—an apple tree… that just makes me giggle.

An Evacuee's Point of View

Much has been said about the disastrous rescue efforts (or lack thereof) of Hurricane Katrina’s victims. Here’s a moving account from an evacuee whom I think should be sainted. requires Windows Media Player

Deja Vu

Ah, Rudi and I are in the midst of it again. Last January, it was the Tsunami disaster, and the heavy programming we did for AsiaQuake.org. Now, as response to the horror that is Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath, we created KatrinaHelp.info with the same people who made TsunamiHelp.info and the SEA-EAT blog.

Wow, what a whirlwind week we had. Since Wednesday, we’ve been working non-stop, dealing with lots of technical issues, mostly involving the migration of the website onto another box because of the huge amount of hits we were getting. Ya see, on Thursday, we had 40,000 distinct hosts visit the site, over 1,000,000 hits, which was at least 5 times more traffic than we ever had with the Tsunami. So, our server basically crapped out and was down for a few hours. When we finally went to bed, we were woken up 3 hours later, at 4am in the morning, because the server went down again. That was just the beginning. What followed was a desperate plea for another server which could handle the load, a failed migration to another box who’s owner was confident his machine could handle it but had to bail 5 minutes after going live because his server basically exploded from the huge volume, a successful move but then having to come up with clever sys admin tricks to get around the painful DNS propagation delay, and on and on and on.

Our days have been like this… Wake up at 6:30am. Work furiously until 1am allowing ourselves ten minute breaks to eat. Work includes having to deal with the 150 email messages coming into our boxes each day. Then we go to bed at 1 or 2am, only to start the day over again. That’s been our life since Wednesday. I know it’s totally worth it though. The site has helped connect and reconnect people as well get messages to loved ones. We’re doing a great public service. It’s just hard to get rid of this general feeling of exhaustion.

I told Rudi today that my tiredness feels very similar to what it feels like to play World of Warcraft for 15 straight hours. It’s that feeling where you want to keep going, and maybe you can, but it’s just your eyes can’t take it anymore because they’ve been staring at a computer screen all day long.

Fortunately, finally, finally, we have a little break. The server is stable, the domain name seems to have propogated ok, and all tech issues handled. Ok, off to take a bath and get something to eat, then maybe I can fit in some other work, stuff I’ve been putting off for a week, finally done.