Longest outage of my site in five years

Kelly’s World has been down since I left on vacation on Wednesday. Of course my faithful readers (Hi Mom!) have my sincere apologies. From what I can see, my main network switch crashed within hours of us getting in my car. I have no real explanation for the failure other than some sort of digital empathy relating to the buyer’s remorse I feel regarding the DI-LB604 I bought a couple of months or so ago. I am wondering if the firmware update I did on that switch a few days before we left is at the root of the failure. Sometime soon I’m going to write a blog entry regarding my fun during the past few months regarding my network configuration, but today is not the day to start that…

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Optimizing WordPress performance

My blog doesn’t get a lot of traffic. It has never been referenced on Slashdot. No one Diggs me. Basically, folks who find my site do so via a search engine, more or less by accident, or are friends and family. The fact that my site has been here at kgadams.net for a number of years and I’ve made an effort to make sure I keep the search engines moderately happy means that I get *some* traffic: maybe ten thousand hits a month, more or less. Just so we are on the same page: many “moderately popular” websites get that many hits in an hour. Seriously popular sites get that many in a minute.

But despite the fact that my site isn’t generating massive influxes of visitors, I still care about performance. It bugs me when my main page takes more than a second or two to generate, or when my administration interface takes ten seconds to appear. So what do I do to improve responsiveness? Well, I visit another blog…

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Vacation starts…

My vacation started on Friday. Well, technically, the days off work start on Monday, but on Friday I realized I’d already worked 50 hours for the week by about noon, and I was feeling beat… so I set up my out-of-office email auto-responder agent, changed my answering machine message, and shut down my work laptop at around 2:00 PM. I’ve had some stress at work the past couple of weeks, mostly good stress, but tiring nonetheless.

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It’s a big ass table…

Microsoft has been working on something they call “Surface” technology. Basically, it is a touch sensitive user interface, and it is usually demonstrated using a large, flat horizontal LCD panel… a table. I’ve had my doubts about the usefulness of this technology outside of a niche environment- but I’m ready to be proven wrong. That said, I find the following video pretty effectively expresses my doubts…

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