Inside the tornado

Ack! I’ve been kind of hiding in my tornado recently and been kind of less-social than usual. This means that I’ve been less active on the site writing or commenting on people’s profiles.  The big project I’m supposed to be working on right now (clean up of all of our email messaging and protocols) is behind schedule by about two weeks. Additionally, this unexpected server fiasco has also put a dent on my schedule so now I feel like I have a big weight hanging over me.

On the surface, things seem to be going pretty well with the new server move. More powerful w/ better, automated support. Unfortunately, there are some unwanted consequences. It looks like it’ll be pretty necessary in the medium term (1-2 months) to open up a second and third server (HK and within Mainland China) to co-host some of the static content like images, CSS stylesheets, and Javascrīpt files. It’s pretty noticeable from here overseas that the server is responding slower – not impossible to surf, but definitely more inconvenient. We’ll also have to move the development servers back here to HK because so it’s slow as heck to save and access files from overseas. Ack… unexpected to-dos when our engineering to-do list before going to Hawaii in October is already pretty hectic.

I kind of wanted to take a week off next week, but I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to. Thinking, perhaps, to hold off until the workload lightens up a little, and then take a hiking trip to Jiuzhaigou 九寨沟 at the end of September…

By the way, I’ve learned a whole new world of email protocol stuff within the last two weeks – It really is a black magic that very few people understand very well and it’s not something I really enjoy doing, but hopefully this will improve alot of the problems we have like getting our emails out of the Spam boxes and making them more clickable in general…