Varrqnuht.net

This is a new record for me:

top - 10:30:09 up 20 days, 23:31, 10 users,  load average: 159.67, 158.79, 158.70
Tasks: 373 total,   6 running, 367 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 84.8% us,  2.8% sy,  0.0% ni, 12.2% id,  0.1% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:  63931840k total, 30363392k used, 33568448k free,    10544k buffers
Swap:  1052144k total,    22880k used,  1029264k free, 28748736k cached

The load average should have been around 28, but a couple of multi-threaded applications had gone slightly crazy. Still, the machine was completely usable at that load, because I’ve set it up so that those busy jobs are isolated from the CPUs running the rest of the operating system processes.

Check this out:

Each of those bars is a CPU - green is idle and blue is busy. If I hadn’t separated the “green” bit from the “blue” bit, everything would be running horribly slow - but this way the damage is constrained.

I’m enjoying my job.

When we were thinking about buying this house Louise was very excited about living near the beach. I didn’t care about the beach, because I don’t really like them much.

Here are the directions to get to the beach from our house.

Walk out the back door (we never use the front door, for some reason), then up the driveway. Turn right, walk past two houses and then turn right again into a laneway. Walk up the lane, cross the road, walk up the path to the beach. Total travelling time is under two minutes, even with a pram.

 
 

So yeah, it turns out that I do like the beach, after all. I still don’t think I’ll spend much time swimming in it though, I’m happy just to look.

I got online just over an hour ago to kill a little bit of time before waking up Sebastian to feed him, and a friend ICQd me to tell me about the bomb blasts in London.

At the moment the BBC is reporting only two dead, while CNN seems to think it’s more. It’s amazing that the death toll is not much higher given that there were apparently six blasts all taking place during rush hour.

It’s terrible to think that we’re all so vulnerable to this sort of attack. I guess that’s the “terror” aspect of terrorism, but I really don’t see how it can ever work in the terrorist’s favour.

I clearly remember hearing about the attacks on the World Trade Center for the first time on the morning of September 12th (local time). It’s not the sort of thing you easily forget - the realisation that the world we live in is only ever moments away from descending into chaos, that we can’t take our peace and prosperity for granted, and that life’s too short to go around holding grudges against people.

If only terrorists felt the same way.

Update: 9AM Well, it seems that a death toll of two was definitely too optimistic. So far it looks like at least 35, with over 700 injured. I spoke to Zola’s nan this morning, and the thing that most disgusts her about it is that it’s a cowardly attack on a civilian populace by aggressors unwilling to face their victims.

Regardless of anybody’s stance on Iraq, Afghanistan or the “War on Terror” in general, nobody can be justified in attacking civilians like this.

What’s more, it can never be successful. The people of London have lived through campaigns of terror before - Nan has told me in the past about having to dive into a ditch to avoid being strafed by German bombers during the second world war. Attacks on civilians failed to destroy the resolve of the population back then - in fact they had the opposite effect. I suspect the same will be true this time around.

There’s a lot of talk about this out on the blogosphere - see here: London Bombings

..and yes, my use of the word “blogosphere” is the final nail in the coffin - I have officially given in to full acceptance of the word “blog”.

Just a quick update. Over the weekend we headed north to Launceston to visit my sister, who just had her second baby girl. Her name is Ebony Rose. She looks like this:

While up there we stayed at the Country Club Resort. I booked the room on Wotif where the normal room rate is advertised as $345. We only paid $150 for it, which is just as well because if we’d paid $345 I’d have been pretty pissed off. It’s not that the room was bad, just that it was nowhere near a $345 room. It had two double beds, and we’re used to a queen-size so we slept in separate beds for the night. It had a small table with two chairs, a TV with Austar, and all the usual trappings like a minibar and bathroom that go with any hotel room anywhere.

On the Saturday evening we managed to get Baz happily off to sleep in his porta cot, but that left us trapped in our room so we ordered room service. The one thing I can say was actually good about the room (rather than merely average) was the food, which was excellent. Mind you, we paid restaurant prices for it so it would want to be pretty good.

So, anyway - here’s Sebastian and I sitting on the bed in our hotel room. He’s wearing a little woollen helmet his GG made him. He’s not particularly impressed by hats in general, but I think this one looks pretty cute: