• David Sedaris on the kookaburra : The New Yorker
  Quote: "One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two."
  (categories: life values priorities attention culture )

• Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods – Something Similar
  Great blog post on distributed systems, via @savagegus.
  (categories: architecture distributed programming systems metrics )

• SSL Added and Removed Here! 🙂 | Teespring
  Yes.
  (categories: clothes t-shirts nsa ssl )

• Dan McKinley :: Testing to Cull the Living Flower
  On A/B testing, growth, failure and externalities. via @rafeco.
  (categories: abtesting metrics experimentation experiments failure externality )

• Chris Hates Writing • Small things add up
  Quote: " Despite doing our best to keep cookie size down, our use of Google Analytics puts the average user’s cookie size around 1 kilobyte. Because these cookies are sent with every request made to content hosted on 4chan.org, the average user must send 4chan roughly 100 KB of data per page load to receive the response."
  (categories: performance http cookies web )

• Home – Sigar – Hyperic Support
  The Sigar API provides a portable interface for gathering system information such as: System memory, swap, cpu, load average, uptime, logins, Per-process memory, cpu, credential info, state, arguments, environment, open files, File system detection and metrics, Network interface detection, configuration info and metrics, TCP and UDP connection tables, Network route table
  (categories: java sysadmin systems devops memory swapping )

• Blog | Eric Larsen Explore
  Quote: "One of my favorite authors, Sigurd Olsen, used the term ‘Lighting Out’ to describe the physical act of leaving the comfort and convenience of modern civilization and heading out into the wilderness. For some, purposefully putting yourself in uncomfortable situations seems ridiculous at best." Have come across the notion of constantly putting yourself in uncomfortable situations as a sure way to keep growing. Like the phrase "lighting out".
  (categories: life lifehacks culture mental-hacks change )

• A Beginner’s Guide to Perceived Performance: 4 Ways to Make Your Mobile Site Feel Like a Native App | Mobify
  Quote: "This is a great example of the importance of perceived performance. It doesn’t matter how fast your site is if it doesn’t feel fast. In the case of the spinner, it just drew the user’s attention to the fact that they were waiting instead of distracting them from it." Also some really cool stuff with touch state and momentum scrolling. The "don’t remind users that they’re waiting for something" reminds me of the NY Times story about the airport that just made people walk farther so they wouldn’t have to "wait" at baggage claim. All about perception.
  (categories: performance mobile speed design )

• Why Waiting in Line Is Torture – NYTimes.com
  Quote: "This story hints at a general principle: the experience of waiting, whether for luggage or groceries, is defined only partly by the objective length of the wait. “Often the psychology of queuing is more important than the statistics of the wait itself,” notes the M.I.T. operations researcher Richard Larson, widely considered to be the world’s foremost expert on lines. Occupied time (walking to baggage claim) feels shorter than unoccupied time (standing at the carousel). Research on queuing has shown that, on average, people overestimate how long they’ve waited in a line by about 36 percent."
  (categories: performance waiting mental-hacks )

• Fix Your Boring Slides – Waxy.org
  Useful advice for presentation slides.
  (categories: powerpoint keynote presentation presentations design )

• The secrets of the world’s happiest cities | Society | The Guardian
  Quote: "… sometimes, he said, he would pick up his three-year-old son from nursery and put him on the back seat of his tandem bike and they would pedal home along the South Saskatchewan river. The snow would muffle the noise of the city. Dusk would paint the sky in colours so exquisite that Judge could not begin to find names for them. The snow would reflect those hues. It would glow like the sky, and Judge would breathe in the cold air and hear his son breathing behind him, and he would feel as though together they had become part of winter itself." Lovely.
  (categories: cities happiness culture life )

• Why Fear of Discomfort Might Be Ruining Your Life : zenhabits
  Or "Run toward things that make you uncomfortable."
  (categories: health life culture )

• Help! Linux ate my RAM!
  Helpful little site that I’m going to use with customers who get amped up about "all their memory" being used.
  (categories: linux memory sysadmin )

• XOXO | cabel.me
  "Now is the best time of our lives."
  (categories: xoxo panic life motivation )

• Java Mission Control (Finally) Released! | Marcus Hirt
  Looks like some pretty nice stuff for ops.
  (categories: jvm ops operations devops java )

Turned 38 this year (holy crap!) and figured that I actually needed to start living a bit instead of just working all the time. For some reason I decided that “living” meant climbing / hiking (relatively) tall mountains so in August I organized a bunch of guys from work to climb South Sister here in Oregon, which was awesome and then just this last weekend some of the same group (and a couple of other guys) climbed Mount St. Helens. One *awesome* twist: we did it at night, mostly because I was out of husband points and couldn’t afford another full weekend away.

We (Alex, Jacob, Joe, Chris, Greg and I) ended up leaving downtown Portland at around 11:40pm, got up to the trailhead (Climbers’ Bivouac) at around 1:00am, attempted to sleep for 30 minutes and then hit the trail at around 2am. It was pitch black (new moon) so we all had headlamps, which made the first mile or so relatively spooky, like something out of a bad movie where all you can see are trees and then darkness. And it was quiet, in fact we didn’t see any other hikers until the next morning when we were coming down.

One of the guys that came with us (hey Greg!) works at Jive and turned out to be a volunteer at the Mt St. Helens Institute, which runs the permitting system and having him on the trip was super helpful. For the first couple miles it’s relatively easy to stay on the trail, since there’s actually a trail but then you hit the rock field and at that point, the trail disappears and you have to look for these 4-6 foot tall posts, which in the daylight I’m sure are easy to spot but at 3am under a new moon are not so easy to spot. Greg (luckily?) brought a really nice spotlight (from his bike IIRC) that was at least 2x brighter than any of the headlamps that we had which he used every couple hundred yards or so to illuminate the next post that we had to aim for. This continued on for awhile and then we started hitting the snow and ice.

Turns out we were super lucky: after the South Sister trip I badgered one of the guys (Alex) to get us some permits for St Helens since he was planning on going. The first weekend that opened up, which we thought would be perfect, was 9/27-28, which, fortunately for us, turned out to be really hard to get permits for (http://purmit.com/) and so we ended up with permits for 10/5. Lucky for us, the weekend of 9/27 turned out to be (literally) record rains for Oregon and Washington and would have made for a horrible climb. The Friday / Saturday that we ended up going was crystal clear and relatively warm but because of the rains the weekend before, meant snow was on the mountain. So the next couple miles, in fact all the way to the top, were full of snow and some ice. Only one guy had the foresight to bring crampons, which, in retrospect, we all should have had. There were definitely some parts of the climb that were dicey, where you couldn’t dig in your toe to make a step and felt like you might slip but the majority of the climb felt mostly safe.

After a bunch of breaks, lots of silent one foot after another in the darkness hiking, we made it to the top around 6:30am, a bit earlier than we had anticipated since sunrise was supposed to happen at 7:14am. I had actually done some research prior thinking that at altitude, that sunrise might happen earlier (which would have been nice) but it turns out (IIRC) that sunrise is affected about 1 minute per 1.5km of elevation, so at 8,300 feet, there wasn’t much to gain. Either way, the summit was amazing and after hiking all that time, a little bit cold. The group of us that made it hung out for a bit, didn’t get too close to the edge (lots of warnings about the cornices at the top of the summit), took some pictures and then headed on down.

Four hours later and after passing a bunch of hikers who were just starting their hike, each of whom asked “are you guys coming down already?”, we arrived back at the car, ready to find to some real food. Or maybe that was just me who couldn’t wait to eat some real food. It was super fun, I can’t wait for the next climb, probably Mt. Adams.

Full set of pictures on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaron_n_karen/sets/72157636378932603/