Saturday, April 25, 2009
Blech
This leaves a sour taste in my mouth -- Chris Day (of Sir Winston / Merivale fame) was doing the news on CTV for a bit...but is now John Baird's press secretary. Blech...John Baird is by far leaps and bounds my least favourite person in Canadian politics.
Had a very quick lunch with Ali yesterday -- she couldn't actually eat lunch with me though because she had to "go pick up garbage"(yes, literal garbage)...
Heading out to a wedding this afternoon...weather's supposed to be a gorgeous and sunny 28 degrees! Don't think I'd posted about it, but I was at Trevor's bachelor party last weekend. Started out in Pickering at his cousin's place - backyard BBQ with roughly 10 computer geeks and 10 firefighters...interesting crowd! They'd rented an inflatable "jousting castle" - picture a bouncy castle but with 2 wobbly platforms and jousting "sticks". The idea is to wail on the other person until they fall off their platform. Needless to say, the firemen won. (although I DID beat a few of em)
Yonny is back in town! Welcome back Yonny! It took her less than 3 days from arrival in Canada to Dessert Trends cake in her tummy...a quicker performance than even I expected!
LT and I are now back to wavering between Portugal/Spain and Greece when it comes to honeymoon. I think our concern with Portugal/Spain is that we don't really know what we'd actually DO day to day (the vision would be to fly in to Madrid or Lisbon, then basically drive the souther coasts of portal / spain, basically from Lisbon to Valencia or Barcelona). Neither one of us just wants to sit on the beach all day.
Had a very quick lunch with Ali yesterday -- she couldn't actually eat lunch with me though because she had to "go pick up garbage"(yes, literal garbage)...
Heading out to a wedding this afternoon...weather's supposed to be a gorgeous and sunny 28 degrees! Don't think I'd posted about it, but I was at Trevor's bachelor party last weekend. Started out in Pickering at his cousin's place - backyard BBQ with roughly 10 computer geeks and 10 firefighters...interesting crowd! They'd rented an inflatable "jousting castle" - picture a bouncy castle but with 2 wobbly platforms and jousting "sticks". The idea is to wail on the other person until they fall off their platform. Needless to say, the firemen won. (although I DID beat a few of em)
Yonny is back in town! Welcome back Yonny! It took her less than 3 days from arrival in Canada to Dessert Trends cake in her tummy...a quicker performance than even I expected!
LT and I are now back to wavering between Portugal/Spain and Greece when it comes to honeymoon. I think our concern with Portugal/Spain is that we don't really know what we'd actually DO day to day (the vision would be to fly in to Madrid or Lisbon, then basically drive the souther coasts of portal / spain, basically from Lisbon to Valencia or Barcelona). Neither one of us just wants to sit on the beach all day.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Sewers
Funny thing about English...
Sewers -- sow-ers or soo-ers....big difference!
Laura: "Hello Soo-ers!"
Sewers -- sow-ers or soo-ers....big difference!
Laura: "Hello Soo-ers!"
Friday, April 17, 2009
Shop shop shop til you drop!
First off, a big thanks to the peeps - Ali hand delivered a very nice, framed full size shot of one of my fav pictures from Merivale-era! Ali...was thinking afterwards, how did you get this done? This HAS to be from oldschool film? (Wasn't someone doing like darkroom development)
I'm biking to work again! Started this week : ) I like it much much more than taking the TTC(however my keister's sooore from the first 2 days of biking). Laura got me some new bike gloves for my birthday!
Laura and I went to the Bay last night to do our first ever wedding gift registry.
i) We had an appointment for 6:30, and had to wait til after 7:15 for someone to actually see us.
ii) They yabbered for almost 30 minutes. "How many wedding showers are you having?" "None" "But what about engagement parties?" "None". "Oh but dear, MOST people have ATLEAST one!" "Yah, that's not really our style" "Well, if you DO change your mind..."
iii) We FINALLY got our hands on the little zapper scanner thing...and in an hour and a half managed to find......2 things in the store that we liked. And honestly, it wasn't me being a downer on the parade. I think we just already have a lot of stuff - plates, wine glasses, cutlery, pots, pans, knives, etc. (Alison - you've got that Jamie Oliver flavour shaker thing on your list...I spent like 5 minutes looking at it last night trying to figure out what the heck it was slash how it works...what IS it??)
We're going to Home Outfitters on Monday so hopefully will have a bit more success there, but I'm leaning more and more to just asking for Kiva gift certificates so we can have fun and make a bit of a difference by loaning out the money until we actually buy a house and have space/need for more stuff...
Should be a gorgeous day and really nice weekend!!
I'm biking to work again! Started this week : ) I like it much much more than taking the TTC(however my keister's sooore from the first 2 days of biking). Laura got me some new bike gloves for my birthday!
Laura and I went to the Bay last night to do our first ever wedding gift registry.
i) We had an appointment for 6:30, and had to wait til after 7:15 for someone to actually see us.
ii) They yabbered for almost 30 minutes. "How many wedding showers are you having?" "None" "But what about engagement parties?" "None". "Oh but dear, MOST people have ATLEAST one!" "Yah, that's not really our style" "Well, if you DO change your mind..."
iii) We FINALLY got our hands on the little zapper scanner thing...and in an hour and a half managed to find......2 things in the store that we liked. And honestly, it wasn't me being a downer on the parade. I think we just already have a lot of stuff - plates, wine glasses, cutlery, pots, pans, knives, etc. (Alison - you've got that Jamie Oliver flavour shaker thing on your list...I spent like 5 minutes looking at it last night trying to figure out what the heck it was slash how it works...what IS it??)
We're going to Home Outfitters on Monday so hopefully will have a bit more success there, but I'm leaning more and more to just asking for Kiva gift certificates so we can have fun and make a bit of a difference by loaning out the money until we actually buy a house and have space/need for more stuff...
Should be a gorgeous day and really nice weekend!!
Labels: Wedding
Monday, April 06, 2009
Oi - What a weekend!
So as I'd mentioned, this was the big weekend for work...really, the culmination of almost 16 months worth of effort. Going in to things, we certainly expected to have a busy / challenging night, but I had no idea just how busy it would be...
There are / were a few "background" challenges:
- We had a limited window of time to do the work...stores in Vancouver close 9pm their time, so midnight here. Stores in Newfoundland open at 11am, so 8:30 here. To make the changes, the whole website had to be turned off to the public, which again means the less downtime the better.
- We were making massive changes from a "data" standpoint...we literally moved and merged over 25 million rows of data repesenting > 4 million customers. It took more than 4 hours with some HARDCORE servers to actually just move the data.
- The sheer number of different systems and servers involved. We modified / updated roughly 10 totally independent applications, ranging from the core systems for creating accounts, logging on, buying items and managing your account, to the systems that customer support uses (to look up orders, handle refunds, detect fraud), to corporate orders, to the applications that send emails ( 4 totally seperate apps). To make things more interesting, because it's such a huge site, most of the applications are load balanced across many different machines...probably touched 20-25 machines total. ( the site can handle lots of concurrent customer requests quickly by balancing the requests out to the 8 different sets of servers)
But we were ready...we'd tested the snot out of this puppy and were ready to roll. Super detailed plan, and probably about 30 people total involved with the deployment( although most were working the 5am - ... shift).
A few highlights:
- By 7:30am things mostly looked good. There'd been 1 or 2 complaints about error pages, but couldn't track them down.
- At 8:30am we turned the site back on for the public....and started to get complaints about error pages, as well as 4 or 5 other major issues (about 10% of people couldn't view their order history, etc). I was one of ~3 tech oriented people trying to track down, isolate and fix the issue....except I had no idea what was causing the problem!
- By 10am traffic started to really pick up as people woke up and came online....started getting ~10 customers per minute seeing error screens, and roughly 5-10 customer complaints to support every 15 minutes, mostly about not being able to place orders. We figured out that one of the problems was a configuration issue on all 8 main servers, so fixed that problem.
- On the conference calls we were having with the VPs every 2 hours, the highlight was the "Looks like in the past hour our sales are down 25% vs last weekend at this time...", then the inevitable "When will this be fixed" question directed over my way ; )
- Finally figured out that the main problem was 1 of the 8 servers....still don't really know WHY it was having problems, but we disabled the server and the errors stopped more or less completely. We were able to test and push out a fix for 4 of the other issues (order history, etc).
- Finally wrapped up and headed home....at 3:45pm. Slept straight from 6pm -> 7:15 this morning. Expect today to be another drama filled day.
There are / were a few "background" challenges:
- We had a limited window of time to do the work...stores in Vancouver close 9pm their time, so midnight here. Stores in Newfoundland open at 11am, so 8:30 here. To make the changes, the whole website had to be turned off to the public, which again means the less downtime the better.
- We were making massive changes from a "data" standpoint...we literally moved and merged over 25 million rows of data repesenting > 4 million customers. It took more than 4 hours with some HARDCORE servers to actually just move the data.
- The sheer number of different systems and servers involved. We modified / updated roughly 10 totally independent applications, ranging from the core systems for creating accounts, logging on, buying items and managing your account, to the systems that customer support uses (to look up orders, handle refunds, detect fraud), to corporate orders, to the applications that send emails ( 4 totally seperate apps). To make things more interesting, because it's such a huge site, most of the applications are load balanced across many different machines...probably touched 20-25 machines total. ( the site can handle lots of concurrent customer requests quickly by balancing the requests out to the 8 different sets of servers)
But we were ready...we'd tested the snot out of this puppy and were ready to roll. Super detailed plan, and probably about 30 people total involved with the deployment( although most were working the 5am - ... shift).
A few highlights:
- By 7:30am things mostly looked good. There'd been 1 or 2 complaints about error pages, but couldn't track them down.
- At 8:30am we turned the site back on for the public....and started to get complaints about error pages, as well as 4 or 5 other major issues (about 10% of people couldn't view their order history, etc). I was one of ~3 tech oriented people trying to track down, isolate and fix the issue....except I had no idea what was causing the problem!
- By 10am traffic started to really pick up as people woke up and came online....started getting ~10 customers per minute seeing error screens, and roughly 5-10 customer complaints to support every 15 minutes, mostly about not being able to place orders. We figured out that one of the problems was a configuration issue on all 8 main servers, so fixed that problem.
- On the conference calls we were having with the VPs every 2 hours, the highlight was the "Looks like in the past hour our sales are down 25% vs last weekend at this time...", then the inevitable "When will this be fixed" question directed over my way ; )
- Finally figured out that the main problem was 1 of the 8 servers....still don't really know WHY it was having problems, but we disabled the server and the errors stopped more or less completely. We were able to test and push out a fix for 4 of the other issues (order history, etc).
- Finally wrapped up and headed home....at 3:45pm. Slept straight from 6pm -> 7:15 this morning. Expect today to be another drama filled day.
Labels: Work
Thursday, April 02, 2009
Bank Error in your Favour
I'd deposited some Canada Savings Bonds back in February. At the time I was really surprised and disappointed by how little interest they'd accrued in the 10 years I had them.
When I got back to my desk, I actually looked things up online, but lo and behold it seemed like what they'd given me was correct...I even went back to the bank to double check though, and yes in fact everything checked out.
Today I got a little receipt in the mail from Scotia saying they'd adjusted my account, and had added almost $200 of interest from the savings bonds! I checked online and yes indeed they had! Woot! Nothing like "found money"
When I got back to my desk, I actually looked things up online, but lo and behold it seemed like what they'd given me was correct...I even went back to the bank to double check though, and yes in fact everything checked out.
Today I got a little receipt in the mail from Scotia saying they'd adjusted my account, and had added almost $200 of interest from the savings bonds! I checked online and yes indeed they had! Woot! Nothing like "found money"
Almost there...
Hard to believe it's April already! It's been a busy past few weeks trying to get the loose ends tied up for wedding planning, as well as putting the finishing touches on the website I'm working on at work, which goes live this weekend!
Laura and I have been down to Niagara on the Lake twice now -- not sure if I posted about the first trip, but it was a bit of a disaster. It was Laura's birthday week, I'd been offered a free night stay at one of the resorts( was looking to plan a weekend retreat there for work). Perfect timing to score some birthday points, and pick up some wine for the wedding. Ya, except Laura got food poisoning from the little place we stopped at for lunch on the way down! The resort gave us a crazy suite - 650 sq feet, fireplace, huge canopy bed, big flat screen tv, tv in the bathroom, heart shapes jacuzzi for two, free bottle of $30+ wine waiting for us in our room, free breakfast for two at their super fancy restaurant.....and Laura was sick ALL night, and on the Sunday we got up and went home right away first thing in the morning. Not exactly a romantic getaway!
So this weekend we "re-did" the trip - I found a good deal on Travelzoo for a hotel in Niagara Falls - $89 for the room, including breakfast for 2 and $45 off at The Keg(although dinner still ended up being $30+ all said). We were MUCH more successful, and hit up 7 or 8 different wineries! We've already settled on one of our white wines and picked up 2 cases of it, and were on the hunt for reds. Will probably do one more trip in the next month or two.
The other big news is the website for work! If you have a few minutes, check out the existing site today so you can hit it up again on Sunday and be wowed by the difference! We haven't changed any of the main part of the site where you "browse" for books (search, book details), but have mostly changed the "Account Centre" (click on Your Account at the top, and either log in to your existing account or create a new one with a dummy email) and the purchase path (once you click "add to shopping bag") - however the purchase path changes are mostly all under the covers.
Anyways! Off to the races!
Laura and I have been down to Niagara on the Lake twice now -- not sure if I posted about the first trip, but it was a bit of a disaster. It was Laura's birthday week, I'd been offered a free night stay at one of the resorts( was looking to plan a weekend retreat there for work). Perfect timing to score some birthday points, and pick up some wine for the wedding. Ya, except Laura got food poisoning from the little place we stopped at for lunch on the way down! The resort gave us a crazy suite - 650 sq feet, fireplace, huge canopy bed, big flat screen tv, tv in the bathroom, heart shapes jacuzzi for two, free bottle of $30+ wine waiting for us in our room, free breakfast for two at their super fancy restaurant.....and Laura was sick ALL night, and on the Sunday we got up and went home right away first thing in the morning. Not exactly a romantic getaway!
So this weekend we "re-did" the trip - I found a good deal on Travelzoo for a hotel in Niagara Falls - $89 for the room, including breakfast for 2 and $45 off at The Keg(although dinner still ended up being $30+ all said). We were MUCH more successful, and hit up 7 or 8 different wineries! We've already settled on one of our white wines and picked up 2 cases of it, and were on the hunt for reds. Will probably do one more trip in the next month or two.
The other big news is the website for work! If you have a few minutes, check out the existing site today so you can hit it up again on Sunday and be wowed by the difference! We haven't changed any of the main part of the site where you "browse" for books (search, book details), but have mostly changed the "Account Centre" (click on Your Account at the top, and either log in to your existing account or create a new one with a dummy email) and the purchase path (once you click "add to shopping bag") - however the purchase path changes are mostly all under the covers.
Anyways! Off to the races!
