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Maria received a registration form for a professional conference that included a statement but no schedule:

Commitment to an open, accessible conference

Some meeting participants experience extreme sensitivity and reactions to scented products, including cologne, aftershave, scented lotions, powders, deodorants and hair products. The board and conference organizers request that all who attend refrain from the use of scented products throughout the conference, using scent-free substitutes that are widely available.

Three things come to mind:

1. Would you want to attend a late-summer conference in the Southern U.S. that featured this statement?
2. What kind of people are attending that this statement is more important than the list of presenters?
3. If the personal care products used by the person sitting nearby is a big deal for you, what transportation, hotel or restaurant could you possibly use?

I’m teetering at the edge of my annual springtime blue mood. It started Friday and by evening I was truly crabby. Maria, having seen it each of the last ten years, recognized the funk immediately and tried to shake me out of it. We took a "mystery tour", a car ride with no particular destination, through the towns of Northern New Jersey, into the mountains and lake region and up into New York. It’s a chance to look at the scenery (me) and houses (Maria) and talk with neither of us on any schedule. The reservoirs are over-full and the leaves are about to burst out. The trees that stand on the rocky little islands in the lakes are half-submerged and the low fog at the water’s surface made them look eerie in the late morning overcast light. It started out fine, but when the rain moved in I felt sulky. At least this year I don’t need to wallow in questions about work. That leaves motorcycling (I don’t do enough), getting old, where we live and what we’re doing to churn over. Came home and after moping around for a few hours and being generally agitated, provoked an argument. That didn’t leave either of us feeling any better. I couldn’t sleep and stayed up way too late even for a weekend. Woke up and all day my mood has been seesawing.

After three years of cellular phone messaging I finally got spam. Yay, it was too good to last. I irregularly received calls with suspect numbers but no one had dumped crap into my message box until today. It had to come from someone brute-forcing numbers through Verizon’s gateway as my phone number is not published anywhere for harvesting and I direct (the very few) people who want to email me through the phone to an account in my vanity domain which forwards to my cellular service. It’s only a matter of time before my work pager starts getting it too. Hopefully Skytel practices better gateway hygiene, at least the less predictable number series presents something of a challenge.

So some idiot decided that some of the paltry graphics on my site were so nice that they would appropriate them. I’m okay with that, there’s nothing special here and anything that is really nice and not derived from a photograph I probably took from someone myself. What I’m not okay with is that rather than just take them, they decided to attach them through an image link to every post they made to a busy web forum. Thanks, but no thanks. If you want it, take it, but don’t bleed my limited upstream bandwidth all day and night. At least the webspiders tend to run very early in the morning so I don’t feel it. I’m surprised it had not happened long ago, much of this stuff is years old. It may be the success of Google and particularly Google Images.

This morning on Slashdot, the geek forum everyone loves to hate, there was a question regarding corporate morale. I’m pretty happy with work now but remembering my Management Techniques of the Bottom 95% of U.S. Corporations page, I gladly linked to it in my comment thinking,"No one reads the ‘ask slashdot’ column and my posts never get modded up." I was wrong.

Starting Score:	1		point
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50% Interesting   20%Funny   20%Overrated
Extra ‘Interesting’ Modifier		0
Total Score:		5

Enjoy your 15 minutes. Next in line please. Oh, and be glad it was a beat column and a weekend.

I have a 1.5M/384K aDSL line and a somewhat retro collection of accumulated hardware. Without going on about all the specifics, the web server is a Sun SparcStation 5 with a model 170 mainboard. In 1997 this was pretty nice kit if not exactly a kicking machine. Expectations have changed and by contemporary standards it is pretty slow.

Expectations, however, don’t have a thing to do with doing real work. The Apache instance running on OpenBSD easily handled the load of those who read the link and those who decided to stay around and browse the rest of the site. Despite the the paltry upstream it is not taking much of a beating. It has served a little over 15,000 requests (several hundred of them CGIs) in the five hours since I posted. That works out to about 1.2 requests/second and the load average never broke 1.00. It clipped 0.83 about an hour in as log rotation kicked over the httpd process and it had to respawn all the children. Allowing the logs to grow larger before rolling and compressing took care of that. I did run ApacheBench against it last month and do some tweaking but it is unlikely that the performance is exceptional. I’m happy to inadvertantly prove the value of an old box.