Apparently my threshold for fats in foods is much lower than I thought… I’m cutting it all out of my diet in the meanttime. The attack lasted about 6-8 hours this time and didn’t end like the others. One other thing to note, although the internet is a good source of information on medical issues, it also has a lot of junk and false information. I didn’t try any of it, but it is hard to navigate through sometimes.
I work as an SE at Plaxo and this article by the New York Times is excellent. Of all the articles on Plaxo, this one captures the real spirit of of the company. I think this is because they actually talked to us and asked hard questions. Previous journalists didn’t talk to us or our users, they just made declarations about us without seeing the value. This article really helps change that.
Had a gall bladder attack over the weekend. Worst ever. It lasted 10 hours and I finally got to sleep around 4:30 AM. I thought I was going to have to go to the emergency room. Luckily, it worked itself out. In hindsight, the reason was obvious, all the foods I ate were high in fat. I just wanted to mention it because it definitely caused a big change in my life.
Mark Fletcher, Bloglines, posted on April 1st that he likes the move by GMail to offer 1 gig of storage per mailbox.
Ok, no argument with that. That is a good move, and it won’t be that expensive. I would estimate it costing $5 - $10 per user just for the storage once you add it all up. They will probably recover those costs in ads or whatever they decide to use for revenues.
Now, when he goes on to say that bandwidth, CPU and storage will be free and infinite… I say whoa trigger, where is my ‘flying car’? I hope that statement wasn’t an April Fools joke…. Mark, as your previous Dir. of Ops, don’t say this! This is dangerous talk and will lead to real service problems in short order.
Lets take Gmail for example. They probably just took your standard 7200 RPM, 200 GIG drive. If you just divide that into 200 active users, you will find that it doesn’t work so well. Disk drives are barely OK for just 1 user. What happens if the drive fails? These are interesting problems, and they need to be solved before you launch the service. Otherwise, if you make a wrong choice or ‘cut’ the wrong corner, you will either find yourself with outages or spending a lot more than you envisioned on the service.
Yahoo Mail ended up using a lot of NetApps for their storage. These cost significantly more than the typical IDE storage systems (or the google style of building a distributed system on top of a farm of PCs). I’ll be that GMail spent a lot of brain power doing it right (probably a nice distributed shared memory architecture over their standard machine type).
All of this stuff costs money, and it isn’t infinite. If you don’t believe me, go and get your own rack at a colo, fill it with decent computers, and give away some free bits. See, its not free… it’s just a lot cheaper.
I’m going to be watching the kids full-time for the next three days. This will be equivalent to going under the arctic ice cap via submarine for the next 3 days. I’ll enjoy it, but I won’t be responding to my emails or phone calls.
For the past couple of days, I’m hearing all of this news about the OPEC oil production cut and how the US government is politicizing the event. In most of the news stories I’ve read/heard (SF Chronicle & NPR), it sounds as though the Saudi’s and other Opec states are ‘not being nice’ by trying to keep the price of oil up. It is made to sound like the US govt. isn’t doing the right thing in it’s negotiations.
This annoys me because the price of gasoline is much more complicated than the price per barrel of oil. Yet, this is not reported. All we here is that this is a “hot button” issue for the presidential candidates right now.
First, there are the refineries in the US. There aren’t that many of them and they haven’t built any new ones in nearly 30 years. (In fact, there was even a fire at a BP Amoco refinery south of Houston yesterday). If they have a limited capacity, which they are begining to have, then the price of gasoline will go higher.
Second, there are the new environmental regulations that continue to come into effect. These definitely cause the gasoline sold to consumers to cost more.
Third, why should OPEC have to listen to the US Govt? Seriously, they have no power over this organization. Why do all the news sources make it sound like some guy in Washington DC isn’t doing his job?
Fourth, it’s not that expensive. Compared to some other recently inflated items, the hit is marginal. (see Real Estate). I doubt people or businesses will change their consumption considering that it is not a major percentage of their personal spending. Think SUVs.
Fifth, what about the other people in the oil business. What about the ships carrying the oil? I remember reading that there are only a few companies controlling these fleets.
Sixth, bought any petrol in Europe lately? It’s quite a bit more expensive than here. Why is that?
Ah, I can go on. It’s complex, and the journalists out there should do a better job describing why this is an issue. Maybe in the process, they will find that it really is not an issue.
Note: I don’t get the Wall St. Journal, or the Economist, but they probably have a better description.
