Streaming My Consciousness

The last few days have been rather stressful.. Our shiny new web infrastructure at COR has been throwing major temper tantrums, which means I’ve been rather busy of late. Today, it melted down half a dozen times after I thought I’d fixed it. Each time it did something different. (and if that wasn’t enough excitement, our upstream provider had a BGP issue this morning that knocked their entire customer base off the web for about 5 minutes)

All you folks that hit our website, thank you for your patience. These have been trying times.

This morning, I noticed something very odd. And again this evening as I’m migrating the data to a new server.

root@corweb1:/content/sites# uptime
11:35:56 up -24855 days, -3:-14,  4 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Negative uptime??? What?

root@corweb1:/content/sites# date
Wed Aug 31 11:50:17 CDT 1955

Perhaps running apt-get install flux-capacitor wasn’t such a good idea, as the machine seems to be performing on about the level of a computer from 1955.

It’s become pretty obvious that something is very ill on that box, and I think it’s time to ditch VMWare Server for ESXi. Until then, we’re moving the servers over to the bare metal on the other box (which includes the blog server, it’s already been moved).

Last login: Wed Aug 31 11:44:51 1955 from XXXX.kc.res.rr.com

No wonder I feel old.

Now that a lot of the back end of our Arena Check-in system is in place and ready to go, I’ve been focusing my efforts on the fun part… Themes!

This school year’s theme is “Go Fish”, so I set about seeing if I could come up with something fun, without hiring an external designer/illustrator to do something for us. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

Still a work in progress, haven’t done the buttons yet (as anyone familiar with the default Arena theme has already spotted), but it’s coming along.

I’ve got 4 different scenes to wotk with for the fish, and the original art is vector-based, so I can move fish about as needed to get out of the way of text – I think I can even make them swim from one illustration to the other via the miracle of the Windows clipboard.

The artwork is from iStockPhoto, from a designer who goes by the username totallyjamie. The font is Chaloops Medium from Chank!.