is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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And another.
A plus is that the lake is filling back up. Since I don't have a hydroelectric generator at it yet (the plumbing's in, and it's in the plan), the benefit right now is purely aesthetic.
Oh, and with the sudden deforestation, the lake's also quite visible from the house for the first time ever.
I got's to have my juice, or I'm not a happy camper.
Actually, if we had a wood stove that could both heat the place (or enough of it) and be used for cooking, it wouldn't be so bad.
With the generator out there humming away, I'm a happy camper.
Good thing we got the generator, or I would've been trying to see if I could get a pair of computers and a monitor running on that little 600-watt inverter.
Actually, we'll need to make it next week. I've been logging chat activity (not what's said in chat -- just people going in and out of chat) and will compile and present the stats here next week, then insert a reminder into the LiveChat code telling people they need to visit this thread to share their thoughts on the value of Chat, how to make it more valuable, and how to make it worthwhile for the site to offer.
The stats I've seen so far are extremely discouraging.
I just checked, and since I started this tracking a few days ago, the LiveChat link has been hit 1704 times by 240 different people. Of those 240 different people, 140 of them have done nothing else on the site since their entrance into chat. No posting, no reading, no nothing. They go to the home page, log in, hit the LiveChat link, and we never see them again. It's just a free browser-based IRC to them.
The thought that was offered before about how Chat pays us back by bringing people to the site and them using the site as a result just isn't supported by the raw data.
When I present the final stats next week, and put the reminder in the Chat link, I'm going to play Devil's Advocate and ask that people look at me as someone with their hand on the power cord for Chat, getting ready to yank it out of the wall, and ask for reasons I shouldn't or ideas to make it not seem necessary to yank the cord.
It'd be tough to even make a case for it currently as a "loss leader". The idea behind a loss leader is that you lure people into the store by selling something so cheap that you lose money on it, but make the money back because they make other purchases while they're there.
I like the idea of having chat because it's unique among message boards and is a big part of what BBSes were about; it's yet another way to foster a sense of "community", which is important to me.
What I don't like is that it's so expensive for us and could end up being quite a bit more expensive (software, new server, more money to the ISP monthly) and doesn't appear to contribute at all to offsetting its cost, even indirectly.
I have some ideas, but will wait and post them when the stats are compiled and the chat folks get their invites to join this discussion. I'll also temporarily move this board to the Free Zone so non-subscribers can participate.
I'm seeing nothing in the trace that could point me to a cause, so I need to adjust the parameters on the trace.
It sounds like the database got too busy with something else while you were trying to submit the reply or the process that was trying to insert a new message into the database couldn't get the appropriate lock because other processes had the kinds of locks on it that prevented you from getting the lock you needed. I'm leaning strongly toward the latter, as I've only forced my desired lock-handling on the biggest culprits. Many still remain.
If that error happens, you should always hit the Back button on your browser and try again.
Those errors (though apparently far more rare now) should become more rare or nonexistent once I get all of these ASP-based queries moved to stored procedures and force lock-handling the way I want it.
On more than one occasion yesterday, my wife looked over at me, a mean look in her eye, and said "I want to move to Florida".
We love it down there. We were down there for a couple of weeks in 99 (lucky to have made it back alive after a friend tried to kill us all in a rented boat <g>) and even went house-hunting near Titusville.
When we got back home, it took us a while, but we eventually fell back in love with our place. Spring and Fall are so awesome here!
Needless to say, we're not particularly enamored of the midwest at this time. This was a freakish, few-times-per-lifetime occurrence, but between tornados, microbursts, floods, and weather that just seems to get really malevolent at both extremes, we're both trying to figure out exactly why it is we stay here.
Although dirt-cheap land and homes sure is a plus.
The print is easy on the eye, and moving around is quick. A quick site is good with a dial up connection.
Probably helps that the programmer is on dialup, too. <g>
I've checked and for the average post, we send about 20% of the traffic over the wires that SI would for the same post. And it'll get tightened up even more.
No worries, dude. Site seemed to run just fine without either of us at the helm. It's on autopilot.
I should be able to put in a good day's work tomorrow.
Yeah, I noticed that was a pretty darned active thread. I'm reading it after I'm caught up in this one.
The site used to (maybe still does?) occasionall display the wrong number of messages in your mailbox.
The reset link just counts the messages so it can make sure the number after "MailBox" is correct.
It's in the plans, but pretty far down the list. Quit getting so much mail!
I've never used the research links. What are they? Links to pop open another window to another site?
If so, what if I made a frame within the iHub window and displayed the other site within that frame? Might be able to do some really cute things with that, come to think of it. Like passing the current thread's ticker (if it's a stock thread) to that frame so you can pull up the appropriate quote or whatever.
We got real lucky as far as property damage goes, but we're not "out of the woods" yet. More precip coming down now and there's a huge maple outside my daughter's window. I wouldn't let her go in her room yesterday. It did end up dropping a big branch but it bounced harmlessly off the roof and onto the ground. Didn't even hurt the gutters. Or are they called "eaves troughs"? Eh?
I talked my wife and daughter into going out on the back porch with me last night so they could hear what I was listening to the whole time I was trying to fire up the big generator: The sound of trees -- big ones -- crashing down. No sooner did we walk outside then "CRASH!" And continued at the rate of about one ever 30 seconds. Really bad scene. And being a closet tree-hugger, it really broke my heart to hear so many of my beloved trees getting destroyed. It looks like my place is still fairly thickly forested, but nowhere near as much as it was before this storm.
There are probably about 20 trees in a 100-yard radius and most of them are obliterated (bradford pears, redbuds, what was a nice walnut, and a lot of maples). The two big maples closest to the house look like they're damaged but will live. I'll at least give them a chance to recover -- I almost cut down the closest one (the one endangering my daughters room, and the whole house, actually -- but I didn't want to worry them) yesterday as a precaution.
I've got a huge old Hackberry just west of the house that's been hit by lightning several times, and drops limbs all the time, but it didn't sustain a bit of damage. Go figure.
My wife just told me that there are 225,000 people without electricity in the KC area. Wow! The population of KCMO is about 450k, if I remember right. But there are a lot of us in the surrounding areas, and it's likely these surrounding areas that got hit the hardest.
I remember a severe snowstorm in the late 70's that had a lot of us not only without power, but trapped in our homes for over a week. At least this time we can drive. But in terms of sheer destruction, I've never seen anything like this. Not even the floods were quite this bad, I think.
The town of Harrisonville, where we got the generator, had juice. There were very few houses between Harrisonville and Boogerville with lights, though. Downed wires everywhere. And since we're so remote and so thinly populated out here (and likely since most of us have generators), we're way down the food chain when it comes time to get grid power back to us.
Power was on for about 20-30 minutes yesterday. It was during that time (I think -- it's all kind of a blur right now) that I posted a few messages.
The electric company says we probably won't have power until Monday.
I've got two, count 'em, TWO friggin' generators. Know how many of them run? Zero. Spun rod bearing in one, and the other, a much bigger machine, just plain refused to start.
But I got lucky. Reeeeeeal lucky. Called a local place to see if they had an engine that'd fit the smaller generator and they didn't. They could order one, but it'd cost more than the generator did. A lot more. So, thinking I was being funny (and knowing how widespread the power outage is), I said, "Well, I don't suppose you have any generators, do you?"
The answer: "Got 8 of them coming in at 5:00 and all but 3 are spoken for. 889 dollars."
"Sold!"
Figured I was getting gouged a bit, but didn't mind. Turns out I wasn't getting gouged at all. This thing's a 5.6KW machine with an 11.5-horse Robin (made by Subaru) over-head valve engine. And, miracle of miracles, it's electric start!
And it's out in the shed right now feeding me 240 volts.
Folks, I don't know if any of you reading this are in the same boat as the KC area is right now, but let me tell ya it's pretty darned depressing when you haven't got juice and you hear you won't be getting it until next week, if then.
Actually, I was just starting to get a handle on getting us by. We have two fireplaces, but the upstairs one is just a plain ol' inefficient one and it was fighting a losing battle last night, but losing it slowly enough we were alright.
The downstairs one has a Buck insert and we used to heat the whole house with it. But it needs juice for the blower.
So, about noon today I had it and a 60-watt lamp running courtesy of a 600-watt inverter I suddenly remembered I had in the shed. Happy day! And I had enough propane in the barbeque to cook lunch for my family and make some hot coffee (I made it yesterday with a teapot and a MAPP torch <g>)
Well, it turned out that the buck stove just wasn't doing a lot of good. I'm not lacking for firewood now (my property looks like it was hit by a tornado), but what I do lack is GOOD firewood.
To heat this place with the buck stove takes a roaring fire on "hedge" (Osage Orange) wood. And it takes a while to get that kind of fire going. If you've got some hedge. Seasoned hedge, at that.
We were trying to heat this place on pieces of Bradford Pear and Walnut, and that just wasn't cutting it. I did find some big oak branches today that'd been knocked down and cut them up (and cut down a hedge -- they don't knock down easy), but it's too green to burn.
So, anyway, it's been a traumatic coupla days for me, but I feel lots better now with the furnace running again, and lots of lights.
Getting the generator connected to the house and cranking juice into it took me about 3 hours (another long story I'll save for later), but at least it's going now.
Don't worry. The generator is in a shed I built specifically for the purpose of housing a generator and is running through a transfer switch, so I'm not backfeeding the grid.
Gonna check mail here, see if we have any bugs for me to squash, *then* I'll go take a nice hot shower. Shows where my priorities are, eh? <g>
He explained that it takes a while to get the registration upgraded at this point, but that it will automate in the near future.
Yeah, I made Registration an immediate/automated thing about a week ago, but am still in the process of working on doing that with Subscriptions. The big holdup right now is the internet merchant account. Some of these companies are not very good about returning phone calls.
I've got most of the code written for automated handling of subscriptions, but can't implement any of it yet.
Short of creating an HTML document and copying in all the previous posts, is there any graceful way to salvage content from the SI site?
Among my several PERL scripts, I know I've got ones that can fetch the contents of entire threads, quickly and easily.
However, I'm pretty sure INSP would take a very dim view of my doing so. <g>
So, the approach you're talking about is likely the only workable one.
Do you have PERL by any chance? ;)
I've noticed the same thing and have often wondered the same. I'll look into it later to see if it's forcing iBox visibility when changes are made, or if hiding it is only a temporary session variable that's being set.
While I was outside wrestling with the generator, I could hear large trees or parts of trees crashing to the ground all over the place. Probably about one every 60 seconds or so.
When I came back up to the house, I found about half of a Bradford Pear laying across the front porch. Had to use a chainsaw to get back into the house. About an hour ago we heard another loud crashing near the house and half of the best Bradford Pear we've got crashed into the swimming pool.
While I was on my way to the workshop to wrestle with the generator, I saw a huge limb on one of our favorites oaks (a very gnarly, twisted, evil-looking tree we call "Hexabus") crash to the ground.
It's definitely not a pretty sight around here.
I was planning to thin our forested areas this spring anyway and sell the firewood in the fall. Looks like half of the work just got done by Mother Nature.
Just too bad she took out some of our "good" trees right by the house. Fortunately, none of them are big enough or close enough to be likely to hurt the house.
One of the TMF AIMers said a feature they really like on the TMF boards has to do with "recommendations."
It's being considered for iHub. I have strongly mixed feelings about it.
Implementation would not be terribly tough. I just don't know if I like the idea and I've got to like an idea a LOT before I'll add clutter to the interface to implement it.
My main concern about it is the possibility of manipulative use. So the answer may be selective implementation.
I tried to setup a new free id today. Got the id, but could not post to the AIM board -- error message said I needed a paid membership to post.
I verified about half an hour ago that that error was happening, but only if the "Post New Message" link was used. It was possible to post a message by replying to an existing one.
That's fixed. Any new member should be able to post either a new message or a reply to your board.
When I registered my id, I got the impression that it might take a day or so for it to be fully setup
I'd better take a look at the verbage in the registration screen.
When a new member registers (which, as you've noted, is a darned quick process -- we don't ask for much info), they should be able to log in immediately and post immediately. It's what we call a "Level 3" account. Level 3 accounts can post only to certain boards (yours being one of them now) and can only post 3 times per day. But they should be able to do so immediately.
Matt manually reviews all Level 3 accounts and if he doesn't see anything that violates whatever criteria he's using (I think "hotmail" addresses is one of them), with a click of the mouse he makes it a Level 2 account, which can currently post up to 5 messages per day. The same limitations apply as to *where* they can post, though.
Strike that "5 post" thing. While I was typing this I decided that was way too restrictive, so I just bumped that limit up to 10.
Thanks for all the help getting set up.
No worries, Tom. I'm far more indebted to you for giving iHub a look-see. Matt and I are both very open about how much we value quality market-related posting, and we'll both bend over backwards to accommodate people who will provide that kind of content.
Though I'm not sure Matt and I are in agreement on this, my philosophy is that if someone can pop open another browser window and use another site to do a specific thing (quotes, charts, etc), then I see no reason to clutter this site up with it.
But I also believe in giving the customers what they want, so the above position is flexible.
For portfolio tracking, I used to use finance.yahoo.com. Currently I use nothing since I'm only in long-term positions and can just wait for brokerage statements.
That problem should straighten itself out in relatively short order. It should only affect a few boards (ones to which people were "posting" last night when the site wasn't actually doing any posting).
If it's still screwy tomorrow in that regard, let me know. It could end up persisting when you're at "specific" messages in a board, but I don't expect it to happen with any posts that were written after 4:30 eastern this morning.
That's somewhat of a relief. I'm way into stability and bug-free code, but am more than a little freaked still about last night's posting outage, and the fact that I missed something in my implementation of the "Free Zone" feature. To my credit, it was a pretty major change that I got rolling "relatively" bug-free in very short order. To my debit, the last bug in it that I just squashed involved nothing more than replacing a ">=" with "<".
That'll teach me to implement major changes late at night.
On second thought, no it won't. I typically do my best work in the wee hours when I can have some music playing quietly and zero other distractions.
Do you know when that was? I'll try it again myself and see what happens for me.
We had a major ice storm and power's been out here since 8 this morning and just came back on (of course, once I finally got a decent fire going), so I need to get caught up.
Is the site running okay, everyone? I was really freaked last night, but did manage to get posting working again and didn't go to bed until it looked stable. That should *never* happen again. <knocking on wood>
test2
test1
To all:
Investors Hub was down from 12:30 AM Eastern to 4:15 AM. This was completely my fault. I ran SQL Server's Index Tuning Wizard. Having accumulated a log of all the queries run for the past 24 hours, I figured I could let it decide for me just which indexes would be best, and gave it permission to modify/remove indexes that already existed. Bad call. I should've left well enough alone.
Fortunately, I've got a copy of the database at home, so I basically copied the indexes from it to the production database.
Actually, it would've been up an hour ago (and I would've been in bed) but I'd commented a line out of one of the files (a line that executed a query) and had put in its place a line to show me the query. That wasn't working so I uncommented the query execution line and continued for an hour (panic-stricken, to be sure!) to go through the tables one at a time to see what was wrong.
Minor problem: I forgot to save the file once I'd uncommented the query. Once I saved it, everything started working again.
So, everything should be working now and I learned a new mantra: "I'll leave well enough alone." Oh, and I'll trust mine and Gary's judgment on indexes before I'll ever trust MSFT's again. <g>
Edit: 4 hours of downtime is really bad, but it could've been worse. I only came into my office because I'd been setting up email on my daughter's machine and needed to get on the server (which I can only do from here) and saw an MSN message from a friend telling me he was getting an error message whenever he tried to post.
Writing a pager routine to let me know when these things happen just moved way up on my list. And the site getting zero posts in any long period of time is something worthy of a page.
Edit 2: Actually, it's a stretch saying the site was down. What was happening was that public posting was down. Everything else seemed to be working.
test
Amen to that, Bro! Hope this message goes through, too.
Geez!
Did I finally get it working again?!?
Hint to anyone who deals with SQL Server. DO NOT run the Index Tuning Wizard and let it replace your existing indexes!!!
I created a Group called "Free Zone" and a Category within it called "User's Groups".
This new Group/Category is being handled like stock-specific boards in that Free Members are able to post there.
Let me know if you see any kind of weirdness. Like the brief inability to post any message at all tonight due to my omitting a character in a line of code. It was out for only a couple of seconds so maybe I'm the only one who saw it. <g>
I had to edit quite a few of the ASP's to make this one work the way I wanted it to, so if you find an error, it won't surprise me. The most likely area in which you'll see an error is if you try to do anything on the site board-related in which we have restrictions on Free Members. The only thing that comes to mind is the ability to create boards and write posts. And I think I got those covered.
I've created a Group called "Free Zone" and a Category named "User's Groups" and moved this board to it.
Let me know if you see any oddball behavior. Especially with regards to free members being able to post.
Specifically ones named after big kitties.
My mouse is goofed up somehow. If I go to the left, the little arrow goes to the right, and if I try to make the arrow go up, it goes down instead. Can you fix that?
3 words:
cord side up
How far away from Arizona are you? It is always warm here
"I hate you, Kenny." -- E. Cartman
Kansas City area here. Fortunately, the south side of KC. I'm chatting with a friend north of the river who says there's between half an inch and an inch of solid ice all over everything right now.
You do not need to go through the trouble of the update just for me.
No trouble for me at all. Took all of 15 seconds to revise the script and fire it off. I'm guessing I've got more total bandwidth available to me (100Mb) than SI does, so they're feeling the load; not me. Actually, it's probably not so much a bandwidth issue as it is just the way they do things there. I worship at the altar of efficient databases and code. They don't.
It's in the high I's right now on that chunk of threads they made. It's gotten about 5k threads and has 10k to go.