JohnA lifeBlog

Writing an enterprise e-commerce platform is seriously difficult work.

Just ask Yahoo! Stores, Costco, or Toys R Us…

Thankfully, our stats show that we had around 3 specific incidents yesterday, lasting a total of around 8 minutes, where load times were unacceptable. At no time were merchants unable to take orders, though.

Not bragging, but just reminding people that there is more to e-commerce than just a couple of PHP pages.

So, what did you do for Thanksgiving? Me, I went to the country’s greatest national park. (Click the picture below to see more of my snapshots)

Personally, I am thankful for my friends and family, and I am especially thankful for my brother coming to visit.

Ok, I upgraded Wordpress, and naturally it broke everything.

I’m going to move to a new server and upgrade everything to see if I can fix it.

…I guess I’ll have to rent it!

My new laptop makes me feel funny in several different parts of my body.  I was going to have it colorized, but I don’t want to let go of it for 2 weeks!

As you may know, one of my favorite movies is V for Vendetta. So when an unlikely internet hero decided to make today a Ron Paul moneybomb day, I was excited to participate.

This morning, I donated $100 to the Ron Paul campaign…. and here is the super-cool screen cap to prove it.

How surprised was I then when tonight, as I write this, the contribution total was quite a bit more…

Ron Paul made history today. And I am glad I was able to be apart of it. In fact, I donated another $50 at 8:57 my time… a small price to pay for liberty, no?

This is the first election I have ever put my money where my mouth is. Indeed, as you may have read earlier, I gave money to a Democrat who is running against Ron. I am NOT a rich man. But I am fed up with politics as usual, and feel that I need to do my part to speak with my wallet about the issues and concerns that drive me.

Donate to Ron Paul, donate to Chris Dodd, or don’t donate at all. Just be ACTIVE this election. This is where we, the netroots, make our stand.

I am SOOO tired of woot.com crashing.  I mean, who do they hire for their sysadmins?  They have no clue how to hyper-scale, and whenever a media event hits their servers, they crash.  I mean, not gracefully… they crash to the point where they almost brag on their static content… “If you can see this image, our servers haven’t crashed yet.”

I am curious… how on EARTH could any serious e-commerce operation be “happy” with that kind of performance.  But what do I know?  I just work for a company who processes over $500 million per year in e-commerce revenue…

So my Tivo Extortion Device arrived today.  Given that my only other alternative was to crack open the case on my Tivo HD, I chose to pay the “protection money” demanded by Tivo.

Here are my pics of the experience.

To be honest, though, Tivo could have been a lot worse in their pricing of the 500GB external upgrade unit.  Still, I think it is bull that they make you buy a “Tivo Approved” device.