Oct 2006, 174 entries

We had a couple quick victories (we think) the last 2 days. We think we sorted a problem in subscriptions that was taking down the site about 2-3 times per hour. Nasty. We also tweaked some database configurations that seems to have sped up the site a noticeable amount. Yea for 43 Things!

Today we turned people’s feeds and subscriptions all back on, finished our work on images (which should all be loading now), and made a bit of headway on the 43Places problems tool. Hopefully we’ll add a new webserver this week as well. So much progress on Lickety Split.

Please go ahead and let us know about any problems you are seeing on the site. The more specific you can be the better. And of course, we love all the compliments and kind words. It is not as much fun to work on the backend of the site, but it makes it more gratifying when we hear how happy it makes you!

Hot air balloon raffles, hot dog parties… what will be next?

It seems I’ve fixed all the image problems for 43 Things, and 43 Places and 43 People will be fixed up tomorrow. Give us a heads-up if you see any broken pages or broken image links on 43 Things.

UPDATE: 43 Places and 43 People now seem to be up to date. If you see anything amiss, please leave a URL for the broken image and the page you found it on. Some may show up after a reload or two as our image servers may be busy rebuilding images for you.

We all had a list of suspects. Is the database only utilizing half its memory? Are aggressive spiders taking down the site? Is there a problem with the way Rails talks to FastCGI? But more than any other area of suspicion, we all knew there was something wrong going on with subscriptions.

So as a test, we turned off subscriptions around noon today. Guess what? The site perked up considerably. Errors dried up, the site stayed up, and “Oops” messages dropped down to a murmur (15 in the last 2 hours out of 105,000 page views).

We are going to monkey around with subscriptions a bit more, but it seems we may have found the greatest offender to site stability. If the site dies in the next few hours, it is probably us testing turning subscriptions back on. For now though, it looks like we got lucky right out of the gate.

What else is to come with Lickety Split? Fixing what ails the problems tool in 43 Places. Reworking the way we get rid of spammers and miscreants on the site. Getting subscriptions to be fast and painless. Lots of caching, some new hardware, some new site monitoring. We will keep going until the site is humming along reliably.

I think there are times when living within 80% of your income makes sense. However, when you’re opening a new business, it doesn’t really. I’m going to keep this on my list, but I’m not actively working on it at the moment.

About two months ago we started work on cupcake, our latest release of 43 Things. But in the middle of that release, about three weeks ago, it became clear we had a problem. The site was slowing down. Too many people were getting the dreaded “Oops!” page.

For the last few weeks, we’ve put aside any new development projects to focus on the site’s performance. We added new hardware. We’ve found some new staff to help with system administration. We’ve fixed lots of bugs. But unfortunately, we have not yet turned the corner. The site is still too slow and too many people are getting that “Oops!” message. So we decided to make it official, we are creating a new release called “Lickety Split” focused around nothing other than making 43 Things fast and reliable. The whole co-op is now working on “Lickety Split” and we hope to soon have all the sites living up that name.

We’ll keep you appraised of the progress we are making. This week we’ll be adding a new server to help with the load of traffic we are getting. But we are also reworking old parts of the site to make them faster and more reliable. In the process, we may need to change a few things – but we think the result will be worth it.

We’d appreciate it if you keep letting us know about your experience with the site. It is always nice to hear some of the good along with the bad. Thanks for your support!

Twozdai posted a photo:

A very good strategy in life is to hedge bets. I think this strategy has been one of my greatest strengths… to consider and pursue multiple (sometimes incompatible) options until one surpasses the others in obvious value. Then taking that, until something else surpasses it in obvious value. This will get you through high school, college, and well into your adult life. Old age even maybe. Keep lots of friends, consider lots of jobs, anticipate a variety of possibilities. If one ship starts to sink, shift your weight into another. And be sure to get your foot in another door quickly. Balance balance. Mix metaphors, thrive in ambiguity, make many bets. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Hedging bets is common sense.

I think bet hedging is a good beginner and intermediate strategy. It works immediately, even on very little information. By being invested in a number of things, there’s a good chance that at least some of them will carry you through. The pattern of things that carry you through become your personality—your preferences and tastes. At some point, you might abandon the hedge bets strategy for the more specific pattern of success that you’ve discovered from trial and error. Or you might not.

You will win some, and you will lose some. It’s almost a universal fact of life. The strength and the curse of the bet hedging strategy is that you’ll never be fully invested in any of your pursuits. You’ll always have a fall-back. With a fall-back, you will never be fully invested (in the metaphorical sense of the word) in any of your pursuits. The difference between hedging your life and hedging your bets is that life is impacted by your investment in it. The more invested you are in something, the more likely it is to become a reality. Imagine if this were true in gambling. Imagine that the more you bet on something, the more likely you were to win. Wouldn’t we bet quite differently then? And, therefore, wouldn’t we live quite differently if we truly believed that the amount of investment we have in life were a critical factor in the chances that the desired life will come to be?

Over the last year, I’ve stumbled backwards onto this counter-intuitive life strategy. The strategy of being 100% in the game, all or nothing, going for broke. In it to win it. This is an advanced strategy that, executed at the right time, can beat bet hedging a thousand-fold. No more dilly dallying. No more hedging bets. I’ve found a couple bets that I want to be 100% invested in. It could of course also lead to rock bottom. No good friend would recommend this strategy, but good friends don’t expect you to win big. To their credit, they really just want you to be happy. More than they want you to succeed, they want you not to fail big. Who will egg us on to a wild and extraordinary life if it requires that we risk ruin? Who will demand that we go out with a giant bang and stretch ourselves to crazy unheard-of limits? Only I can take the responsibility for giving and taking that advice for myself. And that’s what I’m notifying you about here. What I’ve found, is that once people see that you’re in it to win it, and see that you’re acting accordingly, they loosen up their hedges on you and are able to, in return, invest more of themselves into you. It’s a virtuous cycle that leads to everyone living a more extraordinary life.

To repeat, being in it to win it isn’t a risky strategy. The non-intuitive part of this is that hedging all of your bets is risky in the long term because you’ll never put enough of yourself into your life to really get the most out of it. The act of being 100% invested in your life and your projects and your friends will by its nature make it a safer bet, and people will feel safer having you on their side, and might even be inspired to help. If this is all there is, you should make sure that at least once in your life, you are 100% invested. Intuition understands this. In movies, or in stories, where everything is threatened, it is understandable that then it is appropriate to act in this manner… but in daily life our lives and everything we know are rarely threatened on a tangible and immediate level. Instead, the slow molasses of time threatens only small parts one at a time, never raising our alarm that this entire ship is slowly sinking all the time! It’s really a reason to celebrate, relax, and stop dilly dallying.

This is what my new life has become. My name change, my new business, my old business, my friends, everything and nothing, all of this will be wrapped up in a new strategy for living an extraordinary life, rallying people, and creating a bigger idea about what life can be that we can then all step into. Starting, officially, now.

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo:

Buster Mcleod posted a photo: