No show, from fun to frustrating, incinerated

So I got a hold of Rhinoshield, the company that did such a fantastic job painting the house in March of 2011.  I wanted to get a quote from them to fix/paint the pool deck.  The pool deck looks like shit with a number of spider cracks and faded/stained paint as well, despite my psuedo regular pressure washing.  My hope was to use the tax refund to fund the project.

So I made arrangements to meet a guy at the house this morning at 8AM before work.  I didn’t set the alarm and slept until after 7.  I actually was hauling ass to make sure I was all dressed and ready to go before he showed up.  There was one problem, he didn’t.

I waited until 8:30 till I made my first call which went right to the guys voicemail.  I was pleasant enough, and asked for a call back with an eta.  Well 9’oclock hit and I was done waiting.  I called again, again got voicemail and again left a message, this time not so pleasant, letting Giovanni know I thought it was very unprofessional to not let me know he was running late or not showing up at all.

So I don’t get a call back until later in the morning.  Giovani said he had his schedule wrong and apologized.  Whatever. If I didn’t already know that they do such good work I would have told them thanks but no thanks and called someone else.

I told him if he wanted to still go out and measure the deck he could since he could get access through the gate.  He said he would and called me back.  He actually did what he said he was going to do and called me back shortly after I returned from the gym.  He gave me a number that made me wince a little bit since it would eat up practically all of what I had coming to me via the IRS.

I gave him a bit of a sob story and told him it was more than I was willing to spend right now.  I said if he could knock 300 bucks off the price I could do it. After calling someone (supposedly) he got back to me and said he could do it at that number. Great.  It is scheduled to happen next Wednesday.  Based on how the house turned out it should be a dramatic difference.

So, I have been fighting with the Bar-barians website since it launched early this month.  Specifically, I have been fighting with how many cpu cycles it is consuming.  I have done countless tweaks thus far to minimize the footprint the site has on my shared hosting.  Despite my efforts I am still consuming too many resources.  It is only a matter of time until they pull the plug on the site.

My web hosts solution is to migrate to very expensive dedicated hosting, something the Bar-barians aren’t really looking to do.  I feel responsible for somehow shoving this size 13 website into a  shoe half that size in cost since the whole framework of the new site was my idea. One of the ideas I have been working on is using Amazon Web Services instead.

I created a micro instance in their cloud and created a clone of the Bar-barians site there.  In my testing the response times seemed great, everything loaded quickly.  Today I flipped the switch and started directing the rest of the internet to the new AWS server and things went south quickly.  It didn’t take long at all until the CPU of my instance was pegged at 100%, leaving the site staggering along.  I was frustrated as hell all day.  It continued into the night as evidenced by my sugar hoarding, my emotional eating weapon of choice.  I slammed down a pack of pop tarts, a zone bar and a bowl of frosted mini-wheats as I was fcking around with settings, trying to make things better to no avail.

The micro instance is advertised as having a single cpu core but can give you bursts of two core processing power if it’s available.  Well what I wasn’t aware of is if the site gets anything over a few seconds of high cpu utilization, a micro instance has it’s cpu power hacked down severely, making it incapable of doing much at all.

Once the cpu pegged on my server it stayed there for 10 minutes until I killed the server.  It was ridiculous.  So I reversed the migration and for now have everything back to the way it was, on the same shared hosting.

Creating the new site and getting it all working was a lot of time and work, but it was also fun and rewarding.  Dealing with this shit is not fun, and not rewarding.

It seems that not only is the popularity of the site with humans a problem, fcking bots and search engine spiders can hammer the site as well as the try to load every single page that is available on the site to index for their engine.

The path of least resistance for me would be to find the magic bullet that allows me to keep the site where it is now, on shared hosting.  Any other option is going to require another round of head scratching and sugar hoarding.

I had an odd dream Wednesday night, I basically witnessed the end of the world or at least my part of it.  It seemed that it was common knowledge that a meteor was coming, there was nothing we could do about it except wait for it’s arrival.

It was sometime in the morning and I was outside with several people, the only one I remember though is my mom.  We were sitting under some sort of awning just talking, almost like Armageddon wasn’t on the doorstep.

Then all of a sudden I could feel the ground start to shake, lightly at first.  However within a few moments it felt like I was standing in the middle of the field of that vibrating football game we used to play as kids.  The vibrations rattled my teeth. Then, I saw it.

Up in the sky was a streaking light, moving much faster than the video we saw of the recent Russian meteor.  The sky lit up as the meteor smashed off in the distance, seemingly far, far away.  However an awful sound then started.  I could see the wave of earth and fire expanding outward towards us quickly.

It wasn’t until I saw this approaching that I decided to run, not that it was going to do me much good.  I yelled for mom to run as well, directing her towards a building that I thought we could get behind to protect us somehow.  The wave took mere seconds until it was upon us.  As I was running I looked back and saw mom behind me just before she was enveloped in the cloud of destruction.

As it approached me I had one last idea, that if I jumped up in the air just as the impact hit, it would somehow allow me to mitigate the blast and get carried along somehow to safety.

I jumped, the lights went out….. guess it didn’t work.  End of dream.