Megan’s Birthday
It was a great weekend in general. Megan’s birthday party was last night with a large group of friends to celebrate the start of her 30th year (20-10th I mean).
The entire menu was vegetarian since the hostess and Megan’s cousin are vegetarians. That is just fine with me since everything was absolutely delicious. The cake was actually Vegan friendly, but the frosting was not (it had cream). Everything was delicious, so thank you to Dana and John for hosting in your awesome loft.
The menu consisted of:
- Red Lentil & Sweet Potatoe Samosas with Tomato-Apricot Chutney
- Carmelized Onion and Green’s Tart
- Spicy Italian “Meat” Loaf
- Suprise Cake
-
SuperBowl and Twitter
Tonight was Superbowl XLIV (44) pitting the Indianapolis Colts vs. the New Orleans Saints. I can’t remember the last time I missed a Super Bowl, but this one was another great battle. Except for the last 7 minutes of the game it was close and I found it difficult to decide between taking bathroom breaks during the commercials or during the game. As it ended up my bladder made the decision and the breaks happened during both.
It looks like Twitter had a hard time handling all the traffic. I saw lots of reports of fail whales in my feed and even the Twitter API was having issues handling my updates with multiple closed connections. I had to remind myself that even with people tweeting about Haiti, Michael Jackson, and Iran the fact that 100 Million people (one estimate of what I heard) tune in worldwide means that most likely a decent number of them are Twitter users. I reminded myself during the failed tweets that at this time last year Oprah hadn’t yet joined twitter (4/17/2009) and Ashton Kutcher hadn’t yet challenged CNN to the 1 Million follower challenge (4/15/2009).
Another page that had a hard time was Dockers. In their “Men without pants” commercial they gave a site to go to (http://www.dockers.com/freepants). Megan immediately went to the site on her netbook to try and win free pants, but the site was down… I mean crashed and burned. It wasn’t until about 15 minutes later that it came back up. Seriously, if you’re going to put a web address on the screen during a major event make sure your servers back you up. One way of doing that would be through gratuitous use of cache. Load testing people, load testing.
Overall my weekend was great, and the fact that Twitter went down for periods didn’t seem to affect my cable service. Happy (now belated) Birthday, Megan. And congratulations to the Saints, you earned it no matter what any Viking’s fans think.
–dez
