tell me everything

I typed a review of Calculating God over on goodreads. But it turned out to be long enough to be an LJ-sized post so I thought I'd replicate it here.

I would give it 2.5 of 5 stars if you're into that sort of thing. It had some interesting ideas but was overall a pretty weak effort.

( Cut for a whole bunch o' spoilers )

So I'm in Toronto right now, as I seem to do every year during nanowrimo. It's been a fruitful trip so far! When I got on the plane Thursday morning, I was around 6000 words behind nano pace and I decided by the time I touched down in Winnipeg I'd be all caught up. So far, so far. I wrote around 2500 yesterday and 3000 today and I'm now at, well, see below!

As to non-nano events, I finally got to eat Vegetarian Haven's tofu drumsticks again. You see, since I moved to Winnipeg, whenever I'd tried to go, it was on a day when they were closed, or something would come up. I had a brief scare, because when I got there, there was a closed sign in the window, but it's just because they close between 3:00 and 5:00 each weekend. *whew*

Today I wandered around with brightling for many hours. My feet are a little sore; I didn't wear shoes that are good for lots and lots of walking. It was awesome seeing you Ruth :D It had been far too long.

After that, I nano-ed for several hours, and also ate yummy food at Spring Rolls.

Hi Toronto People! I'm flying into Toronto for the weekend for nanowrimo-related festivities.

And! Tomorrow night for one night only, I'll be having supper with the lovely ginny_t at Vegetarian Haven at 5:00pm! You should come too and have supper with us.

I should caution that Veg Haven has a long and storied history of refusing to serve me. So in that event, we'll go to the all you can eat sushi place across the street. (Sushi Ya!, iirc)

Please?

So... we've talked a lot about types of food that you like. Now how about what style of ethnic cuisines you dislike?

For me, I like nearly everything I've tried so far, but I have to say that Latin cuisines of all types don't do much for me and I don't find them very interesting, memorable, or exciting. Mexican in particular really doesn't turn me on. I suspect the same would be true of some European cuisines, but I haven't tried them often enough to know.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

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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.

Who here plans to see the movie 2012 when it comes out?

Honestly, having seen a metric buttload of movies this year, I can honestly say that it seems like it's going to easily take the title of Most Retarded Movie of 2009, stealing it cleanly from Knowing, or possibly this year's Final Destination movie (which is the only movie I almost walked out of in probably over 60 movies I've seen, which I only attended because I was interested in going to a more "adult" 3D movie).

Frankly, there is nothing I detest more when it comes to movies than action flicks and endless mindless violence / destruction. (This is why, despite the fact that it had many good ideas, I had a really hard time fully enjoying District 9). The previews for 2012 have made me roll my eyes so much that I fear I might simultaneously sprain them both. I would rather watch a fruit fly live its entire life and die than go see it.

In other news, my favourite movie of the year? Easily Coraline. Loved, loved it. Only movie I liked enough to repeat more than once: I went three times.

Nano continues apace. I'm about 400 words ahead of par, which is cool. My nano tradition is usually to lag a couple thousand words behind for most of the month. My story is still fun, but I worry that after 10-15K it may get incredibly tedious.

I'm also feeling rather busy. One of the Toronto folk asked me to write an IRC bot for the Toronto IRC chat and I've been poking away at my nano-specific editor. *sigh*

And in other news, I'm going to be in Toronto from Nov 12th to Nov 15th, hanging out with folks and writing! I'm hoping this trip will be a little less busy than my typical trips, with more lounging and less desperate running around to visit people. That's what I always say, though...

I've trimmed my friends list here a bit, for a few reasons. If you wanted to still be reading about my life, or you're just finding this journal and want to come in, leave a comment (all comments will be screened). Thanks.

I'm even currently ahead of schedule!