I had never heard of the Tough Guy Challenge until seeing The Big Picture’s photo essay about the race. Holy crap, these guys are nuts. Looking at a couple other feature stories about this event makes me either think A) The folks that finish this are the stupidest people alive, or B) They are indeed the toughest people alive (though I think the the folks who did the Raid Gauloises or the Badwater or Sahara Ultra Marathons might have some bragging rights in that department as well).
BendBlogs.com Fixed, Server Almost Back To Normal
What a couple of days it has been.
A couple nights ago, the server that hosts this site and several others (including my employers’) that I manage had a backup hard drive fail. Not the end of the world, the datacenter could swap in a new one, be back up and running in 10 minutes. I did an offsite backup, just in case, and we swapped in the backup hard drive, and things were running smoothly again (once I got the thing partitioned properly so that my backup tools recognized the drive properly).
The problem is that two sites I had been working on when the thing got rebooted had some issues when they came backup (they were having issues before, and this just forced me to look at them a bit harder). First off was the church’s site. The WEC Typo3 install I had been running there had already been going a bit bonkers, so I had to try to get that upgraded and backup and running again, as I didn’t really want to lose their large sermon archive. Typo3 is sometimes a bit of a pain to upgrade/reinstall properly (at least to somebody like me who hasn’t dealt with Typo3 much and am used to much simpler databases applications). I think I’ve got it back up again, but need to do some tweaking before I turn it live.
A constant nagging problem I’ve been having with BendBlogs.com is it’s VERY heavy MySQL usage, and it’s creation of a bunch of large temporary tables. Folks will periodically get this error when loading the site. I’ve been trying to find time to redevelop that site using Movable Type and some plugins developed for Blogs.com that can be used for this type of thing, but I’ve been just totally slammed. In the meanwhile, I knew a temporary fix would be to increase the size of my /tmp partition on the server and setup a script to keep it clean in there, but I didn’t want something that would bugger up cPanel. So following the directions here to edit cPanel’s securetmp script to increase the size, I then removed and recreated the /tmp partition following these directions (as it’s basically a virtual partition that cPanel creates) and that got rid of the error on bendblogs.com. I also increased the memory_limit a touch in my php.ini file to give things a bit more breathing room, so hopefully that’ll hold things at bay until I can find more time to redevelop the site so it doesn’t pound the MySQL database so hard on page loads (as it doesn’t do as well caching things as I’d like).
Time Killer For The Day
Perfect Balance is a frustratingly fun little game, so if you need some help there are walk-through videos here.
Scarlett Johansson is (apparently) a Clone
So Jen is browsing around the Web site of her (and my) former employer and finds this crazy comment on a story:
I’d like inform you that Scarlett Johansson “actress”actually is a clone from original person,who has nothing with acting career.Clone was created illegally using stolen biomaterial.Original Scarlett Galabekian last name is nice, CHRISTIAN young lady.I’ll tell more,those clones(it’s not only 1)made in GERMANY-world leader manufacturer of humans clones,it’s in Ludwigshafen am Rhein,Rhineland-Palatinate,Mr.Helmut Kohl home town.You can’t even imaging the scale of the cloning activity.But warning,H.Kohl staff strictly controlling their clones spreading around the world,they’re NAZI type disciplined and mind controlled,be careful get close with clones you will be controlled too.Original family didn’t authorize any activity with stolen biomaterials,no matter what form it was created in,it’s all need to be back to original family control in Cedars-Sinai MedicalCenter in LA.Controlling clones is US military operation.Original Scarlett never was engaged,by the way
After a bit of Googling, apparently these nut-jobs are all over the place. Granted, the woman does have pretty nice body and features, so maybe she is a creation of science. Or not.
But with research coming out today that human clones may be genetically viable, who knows what to think anymore. Heck, she could be a frickin’ robot for all we know. Just the same, if we see an army of hot blondes coming our way with lasers, start running, as we all know that leads to trouble.
Are You a Fan of Eminem, Benny Hill and Doctor Who?
First off, you’re a weirdo. Secondly, here’s a video for you:
The Hamster Did It!
You have to love it when live news footage goes wrong…
Time Killer For The Evening
Can you beat the hangman?
That’s A Lot Of Glass
While I don’t have a clue why anybody would do this (it almost brought a tear to my eye looking at it), seeing a Nikon D3 with a 14-24 lens cut in half was a very educational experience.