~*~ Finn ~*~

a map of the universe

I love APOD.

We are a tiny but unique piece of something grand.

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

Seen at justcreate. I thought these were cool questions so I'm repeating them here.

What are you working on? What have you finished? What do you need encouragement on?

Are there any cool events or challenges happening that you want to hype?

What do you just want to talk about?

What have you been watching or reading?

Chores and other not-fun things count?

(I'm tossing my own answers in a comment to this)

Finally, I'm on the upswing of a wicked head cold. Naps helped. Lots of naps.

I'm digging into my Fandom Trumps Hate fic. I hope my bidder likes it. In any event it's keeping my brain occupied and keeping me out of trouble.

I came across this article 7 tiny hacks that can improve your to do list and it reminded me that years ago I made a to do list every morning.

It's been awhile since I did that. Life's a little simpler now that I'm retired and my kids are grown with families of their own. I gotta say, it did help.

How 'bout you? Are To do lists a part of your day?

I'm going to admit right now, my list were far too ambitious and I did well if I could finish one half of the tasks.