Vacation all I ever wanted...

Ahhh.... I am just now coming down off my vacation high. 5 days of Hiking, Biking, Scootering, and drinking. Life is good. Felecia and I just got back from Glenwood Springs Colorado, we spent 4 days there taking in the sights. we did a 16 mile Bike ride, a 2.5 mile hike (which ended at a hanging lake, very pretty, I will include a picture soon.), and numerous excursions into town.
Today we finished off our vacation with a scooter ride with English Rose scooter club, a very fun ride to Tibble Fork Lake up American Fork Canyon. It was a good ride with good people, Tall J even brought up his camera kit and took some cool pictures of us on our scoots.

It is going to suck to go to work tomorrow.

5k

at 6:30am Katie, Felecia and I all got up, brushed the tiredness out of our eyes and stumbled down to Liberty Park to start the 5k portion of the Salt Lake marathon. up until the moment the race started I was filled with doubt about if I reallllllyyyy wanted to be doing this. BUT, the moment the band (school of rock) started up with the wailing guitars... Man, I was hooked. endorphines and other previously absent chemicals starting flowing to my brain, pumping out long forgot thoughts of "you will win" or "Stomp those fuckers with strollers! more running room for the runners!". I felt like a champion boxer just before the first ding of the bell. Then the horn went off and the mass of runners surged forward in a slow crawl past the starting line, previously Felecia and I decided that we were just going to walk and do a bit of running, all that changed the minute I got passed the starting line. We all ran along with each other until we got out of the park and then I couldn't stop running, I was feeling great and didn't want to slow down, I looked back but I couldn't see the sister or Felecia, so I just turned and kept running. about a mile into the run I realized that this wasn't so bad and that my previous spurning of running was entirely unfounded. I was loving it, my lungs were burning but my legs were keeping up. As I rounded Pioneer park and making the last stretch onto Rio Grande road, I heard clapping and whooping coming from behind me, I turned around to look and I was greeted with a view of a very tall, very lean muscular Kenyan man running first place in the half marathon. Holy shit I thought, that man is totally kicking some ass! jebus he is all leg! shit, that's my new hero. I wanted to shake his hand at the finish line, but by the time I got there he was no where to be seen. oh well.

Anyways, I finished the race, but I am still hungry for more. I think I will be finding more 5k's to run and next year I want to hit up the 1/2 marathon. Hopefully my new hero will be back for another go next year.

Andrew Barrrett unofficial time for 5k: 41 minutes.

Felecia kicks balls

I went out and supported Felecia's kick-ball team last night. They played the Turkey Burgers and lost 7 to 1. oh well, at least she got to kick some balls!

Scooter

My Stella is quite a girl all tarted up in chrome.

Hike

Went hiking yesterday after work. It was just a quick jaunt to the avenues twin peaks, but it felt good to get outside and do something other than walk around the park, or the trail by my work. This has me really excited for hiking again, last year was a complete wash out due to the new job. This year however, I am going to push myself to do a shit-ton more hiking, going to try and knock out a few more of the Peaks ringing the valley here. Storm mountain is high on my to-do list. well enough blah-blah have to finish up work and hit the sack.

Application tuning

so yeah, work basically sucked last week. we ran into a huge issue last week with our systems. On a 10,000ft level, the application servers and attached equipment were causing the database servers to max out the CPU's. Now these DB servers are no slouches in toughness. they are equipped with 4 64bit dual core processors backed up with 25 gigs of RAM. 8 cores total were being maxed out by the application servers throwing massive amounts of simple commands at them. at one point I counted up each app server (total of 6 per POP location) dishing out well over 10k requests per 3 minute interval that I was tracing. It's not like the stored procs that were getting called were poorly tuned or missing some critical index, it was just the shear volume of requests that were coming in that was bring down the house. So, for 3 days we dug and dug and dug and dug to try and determine why exactly the application servers decided to all-of-a-sudden start beating down the database servers. Well, after 3 days of intense searching we are still stumped. for the most part it is in Engineerings hands right now, and the only thing I can do is wait and see what they come up with(their mess not mine! :) ). Hopefully Monday will come with a wonderful reward and our talented engineering group triumphantly vanquish this nasty little foe. Until then I just hope we haven't pissed off too many clients.

--Andy

Me and the Wife

The above is a snap of the wife and I at the St. Patrick's day parade in downtown SLC. Good times were had that day. We spent the morning at the parade with friends, went to Saundras for lunch, then went to the Republican for tasty adult beverages. Much Guinness was consumed on that day.