They move away from me, and look what they get:

Weather!

Of course, having the car move from the top of the driveway to the bottom of the driveway overnight, while in park, probably wasn't what they were expecting.

When's the last time I read a book?

From start to finish, cover to cover?

I don't know.

I know I have Mark's copy of Catch 22 at the top of my stack. I've tried to read it three or four times. I've started, stopped, restarted, stopped again. I keep going through that cycle, never quite getting into it. Mark and Tyler and Kris all say it's worth the read. They all admit it's a boy's book, too. That might be part of the problem of my inability to read the book.

I have three or four technical books I've started and managed half way through or so. Haven't finished them.

My commute is four minutes long, seven on a bad day, so the books on CD that I've been "reading" have taken me months to finish, when they take Kris only a couple weeks. Though, with his shorter commute, he's managed to draw out the stories to all of maybe a month.

Maybe.

I can't believe my concentration has dwindled to mere moments on a web page or partial hours with a magazine. Is a thousand word article really my max? Can I really read a classic only in five minute increments?

I remember months, which have probably faded to years, ago thinking, I'm too busy, something has to give. Then it was my health. Now I think it's going to be the Intarweb™. There is so much interesting information out there that stopping is going to be hard.

But, geez, I haven't stopped to read a book since I threw the last Harry Potter across the room in a fit of anger at the death of one of the characters.

Today I had a client emergency. Their website response times had been deteriorating lately, and had hit a critical spot today, causing cascading failures in their systems. When I logged into the database server and started watching the processes, it became clear fairly quickly the server was either overloaded or spinning it gears, and causing the website to slow.

I looked at the usual culprits for system slowdown (disk space, runaway processes, excessive memory consumption, swap space issues), with no success in finding the problem. I started watching the database processes for bad (unoptimized) queries and found several locked, waiting for another query to complete.

A little digging later and I found a sessions query was locking the system. Puzzled, because this query is optimized and very simple, I went to clear old sessions from the sessions table.

To realize there were around 670k sessions in the table.

There should be a few thousand. That there would be this many was momentarily puzzling. They're cleared out on a regular basis. I started a delete query to remove all of the anonymous user sessions.

I have so many watches and checks and alerts on these systems, that I receive warnings (email, SMS, IM) when it hiccups, how could it have gotten this far?

As I watched, the system deteriorated so that I couldn't become root, nor could Mike or I log in remotely. I had to go to the colocation facility and the computer directly to log in. Off I went, and twenty minutes I was at the colo. In that twenty minutes, and it did take that long, the delete sessions query finished, and the system was humming along again.

I drove back to the office puzzled.

And then it hit me.

The website receives a frequently scheduled hit to a page that triggers the database clean up. That scheduled process was sending me email on a daily basis. I was ignoring them because, if everything is running properly, I shouldn't receive them.

This was the problem. The scheduled process wasn't cleaning out the database tables as needed, and I was ignoring the error, and the sessions table grew to an unsustainable size for the frequency it's accessed.

Lesson learned: listen to the small errors before they grow into big ones.

When I went to the airport on Monday to pick Mom up, I drove into the parking structure to park. She had let me know that she was cleaning out her garage, she had found stuff for me, and she was bringing it: pull up the car and come in to help carry it out.

When I went to park, I drove next to the entrance to the baggage claim, and to my left was a one hour parking spot. I stopped and stared at it for a few moments, trying to figure out if this space was really okay to take. It wasn't a handicapped spot. It wasn't an electric car only. Oooh-kaaaay.... I thought, as I eased into the spot.

Baggage claim was twenty feet from my car. I could not have parked any closer.

Monday evening, Mom and I went to Whole Foods to pick up items for dinner. We were winging it, not really any dinner plan. As we pulled into the lot, a car pulled out of a spot right next to the front door.

We pulled in behind and parked all of twelve feet from the store entrance.

This, in a lot I'm used to hoofing it clear across the expanse of cars, having fought for that one space that I parked in where even I couldn't get out of my tiny car because the cars next to me were parked so close.

Today, Mom came for lunch. She asked to have my car instead of the truck for her afternoon errands. When I went to move the truck to a closer spot after handing Mom the car keys, I lucked into a spot closest to the crosswalk from work.

Sure, the spot was fifty feet from my desk, but it was the closest one to my desk.

That woman is a parking spot good luck charm. I need to figure out how to bottle this parking karma. I'd make millions.

No, billions.

I received an email from Mom today:

I found her on my doorstep. Says that she's related to MK and insists on coming along. I frankly don't see much family resemblance, so I think she's a poser.