Bee: 1, Scott: 0

Yesterday, my wife and I were walking to lunch (I was carry the car seat with our son in it) when I felt something on my neck. I swatted it off my neck only to discover that it was a bee and it stung me on my hand. As an EMT, I'm taught to scrape off the stinger with a card so that no more venom gets injected. While this is great in theory, it sucks in practice when you're in pain and panicked. I didn't even think and just pulled the stinger out and then picked out the last little piece from my hand. Luckily I'm not allergic (we were actually in an ideal spot if I was as we were 3 minutes from the hospital), but my hand still hurts. I would have been happier if I had managed to kill the bee, but it flew away. At least it can't have another victim.

Fast work by SDGE

I got a letter in the mail the other day saying that SDGE (our local power company) would be replacing a transformer at about 1 pm and to shut off sensitive equipment, etc. I heard the trucks outside around 12:30 pm and shutdown everything, but left my server running as it is on a UPS and has about a 60 minute runtime. The outage said it could last about an hour. Promptly at 1 pm, I heard the refrigerator shutoff. 12 minutes after I heard my UPS start beeping, I heard the refrigerator start up again. In fact, here is the log from my UPS:

Thu Aug 02 13:11:45 PDT 2007  Mains returned. No longer on UPS batteries.
Thu Aug 02 12:59:46 PDT 2007  Running on UPS batteries.

Excellent work! I'm quite impressed with the very short amount of "downtime" (it really isn't downtime as I have a cellular modem and a laptop, so I was still working when the power was off).

Too quick to blame Time Warner

I called Time Warner this morning and we worked on some basic troubleshooting steps I should have done before (restart the cable modem and restart the networking on my server). Low and behold, everything worked again. Why? I have no idea.

Thanks, Time Warner

My ReeceiptWallet sales yesterday were down significantly (I sold 1 copy) which I thought was extremely odd. When I checked my logs today, I saw that no one had visited my site yesterday which was impossible as search bots hit it all the time. I logged into an outside server I have access to and tried to connect to my site; it failed. Hmmm...my main site (www.gruby.com) worked fine. What was the difference? I remembered that receiptwallet.com was on a different IP address. I switched everything back to the main IP address and will give Time Warner a call in the morning and find out what they screwed up (it appears to be their routing tables) and see about a nice service credit for this. This also explains why someone said that mail to receiptwallet.com bounced, but to gruby.com didn't.

Uggh, computers suck.