Punkie Snoozing

I’ve been so busy lately that I hadn’t had much chance to update my blog. I didn’t notice I was burning out. Now I’m too busy being tired that I’m so tired of being busy.

Now my weekend is over. A small window of opportunity to let laziness kick in and update my blog. Upgraded Gallery photo album modules too. Time flies. Luckily, I’m on a Mac. If I were using Windows, I’d be rebooting right now.

Allow me to rant a little.

Last week I was in Shenzhen, China. Twice I had to deal with sleep paralysis or what some may call night terror. It scared the hell out of my roommate, but even if you’re superstitious, if there’s anything I learned about spiritual warfare is never to give credit to the enemy. So let’s just say I had a very bad brain function error.

Now, I was there on an important holy grail quest. It was all sweet and dandy except that the holy grail I was searching for is a magic number. Hundredth of a second. That’s the duration I was seeking for out of a 4-way i570 in a voluminous banking environment.

That went well in my preliminary run. I thought the machine had so much juice it could roll in with several more punches.

Next I had 12 personal computers setup. Each one with at least 1GB of memory simulating 150 clients, thereby amounting up to 1,800 simultaneous clients. The sampling rate? I placed the bet on 288,000 transactions in less than 20 minutes.

I think I may have overdone it.

What happened next was a series of fine-tuning and query-validating. I felt bad. The dark side of me was glowing with hacker pride for ravishing the nifty iSeries. I was overconfident with the preliminary results. The going was tough.

And when the going gets tough, the tough gets a MacBook Pro to the rescue!

There’s a good way to present not-so-good news. I prepared my presentation in Apple’s Keynote and the shiny silver glory of my MacBook Pro overwhelmed the crowd. So I may exaggerate a little, but being distinctively Apple puts me at an advantage of being technically credible.

And that’s why starting from today onwards, everything Apple and Mac deserves it’s own category on my blog. An Apple a day keeps Norton away.

Still, I’m tired and I need a break. I’m looking forward to the middle of next month when I’ll be going on a vacation to Egypt. This would be my third major getaway since I started working 7 years ago. The first was New Zealand, and the other was Disney World in Florida.

Here’s my chance to see the pyramids along the Nile (yes, Patsy Cline is singing in my head), Valley of Kings, and the (once) intellectual city of Alexandria.

Or if I could get to snooze like a dog for a whole week, that would be good too.