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That's right, I woke up at 5am yesterday and I have been awake since then. Long story, or stories, or something, I don't really know at this point. All I know is that I am sitting on the floor of my mom's sewing room hardlinked to her DSL typing this post. Yes, my mom lives in Oregon, so some decent deductive reasoning would lead to the fact that I am currently in Oregon.

I decided to drive to Oregon yesterday morning, or the morning before that, I honestly don't know what day it is. But let's back up a little...

Last friday I got a call from my mom regarding my father. My father has been having some serious back pain for the past few months, or longer, not sure, but it's been bad. He/we just assumed that he had a pinched nerve or something, but when the pain didn't go away he finally got an MRI done, that was last week sometime. The MRI came back with him having a cracked disc (L5 I believe). BAD! Bad enough, actually, that they scheduled emergency surgery for yesterday. I found this out friday. My mom is stressed out pretty badly, and it's wearing her down. There isn't much I can do from San Diego to help, so I felt pretty helpless. Then an opportunity came along, or rather I just decided to drive up, either yesterday or the day before, can't remember. Anyhow, it just made sense because I was being faced with some other personal issues regarding my car that have been giving me anxiety for the past 6 months so extreme that I have almost delved into panic attacks on numerous occasions. So anyhow, I decided to drive my car up here and leave it here. That is a totally different and very involved story which I have no desire to talk about, but that issue is off my chest and I feel good. Ok, back to my father.

So dad went into surgery yesterday morning at 6am, it was supposed to be a fairly routine 3 hour surgery, I called my mom around 2pm, and he still wasn't out of surgery. I decided not to push any questions on my mom as I could already tell she was pretty concerned. So the surgery is over I guess around 3pm, a little longer than three hours as predicted. And all my mom could really do was to tell me that it wasn't good, there were more problems than the doctors thought. No details at that time, but things weren't as bright and shiny as we thought.

A few minutes ago I got a little more information about my dad state of being...bad, as in not good at all. The doctor asking my mom to figure out the best way to get a hospital bed in our house was a big flashy light letting us know to expect nothing, and everything all at once. So I am here, awake for over 32 hours straight, nothing and everything on my mind, not tired, wanting to be tired, and hating that it's always the good people that seem to get crapped on the most. My mom does not deserve this, my dad definitely does not deserve this. It's not fair that I have to go back to SD in two days and leave my mom to deal with this, I should be here, but I can't. That sucks, not happy about that. It's not fair that my brother is stuck on a freaking boat in the Bering sea finding out about this on a telephone. Suck.

On the brighter side, I have my kitty, and I am surrounded by my trees. The 13 hour straight through 1000 mile journey is worth it, even if it's not good, it's necessary, for me, and my family.

Shit, now I think I'm going to cry, damnit.

So I am bored tonight. What I wanted to do was go take some night shots in some alleyways. But I really wanted a subject to make the shot a little more personal, alas, I couldn't think of anyone I could call at 11:00 at night to ask if they wanted to go scour the alleyways of the ghetto for the sake of artistic photography. Instead I decided to turn all the lights off on in my apartment and setup my tri-pod on my balcony. This is a little of what I accomplished...

Hope someone likes these, I know they are oversimplistic, but it's hard to create aesthetic beauty out of a ghetto alleyway, you gotta shut a lot of stuff out! :)

P.S. There is no photo editing on these shots except the cropping! Wootah!

cote (whose blog title is "People Over Process"!?) wrote:

There's a certain point, to be a cynical coder, where people just show up at meetings for face-time: to show that their involved. I'm not saying that these people don't have valuable work that could be done. Instead, their perceptions is that showing up at a meeting is the prime channel to prove that they're doing that valuable work and to do that work.

The perception is there for a reason. Face to face time, whether in meetings or the hallway or lunch, builds trust among humans. Lack of face time breaks down trust. Employ workarounds for this truth at your peril.

SETH PRUITT

Seth Pruitt

Currently (rev 1193), a typical CherryPy request has a standard execution path, and a standard time to complete it:

0.008 _cpwsgi.py:51(_wsgi_callable)
    0.001 _cpwsgi.py:36(translate_headers)
    0.001 _cpengine.py:131(request)
        0.001 _cprequest.py:623(Response.__init__)
    0.006 _cprequest.py:116(run)
        0.000 _cprequest.py:230(process_request_line)
        0.001 _cprequest.py:265(process_headers)
        0.003 _cprequest.py:189(respond)
            0.001 _cprequest.py:294(get_resource)
                0.001 _cprequest.py:415(Dispatcher.__call__)
                    0.001 _cprequest.py:432(find_handler)
            0.001 _cprequest.py:326(tool_up)
            0.001 _cprequest.py:644(finalize)
        0.001 cherrypy\__init__.py:96(log_access)
            0.001 logging\__init__.py:1015(log)
                0.001 logging\__init__.py:1055(_log)

0.001 cherrypy\__init__.py:51(__getattr__)
0.001 :0(getattr)

That is, _cpwsgi._wsgi_callable() takes about 8 msec (on my box using the builtin timer). That number breaks down into 1 msec for translate_headers(), 1 msec for _cpengine.request(), and 6 msec for Request.run(). Etcetera. These are all of the calls which take 1 msec or more to complete.

It looks like moving to Python's builtin logging for the access log has added 1 msec to Request.run(). I think that's reasonable; we lose a millisecond but gain syslog and rotating log options.

Somebody please explain to me why _cpwsgi.translate_headers takes a millisecond to change 20 strings from "HTTP_HEADER_NAME" to "Header-Name". I've tried lots of rewritings of that to no avail; moving from "yield" to returning a list did nothing, nor did inlining it into _wsgi_callable.

I tried making the default Dispatcher cache the results from find_handler. That is, cache[(app, path_info)] = func, vpath, request.config. I couldn't see any speedup on cache hits.

The next-to-last line above is interesting. 0.001 cherrypy\__init__.py:51(__getattr__) shows 1 msec being used for cherrypy.request and cherrypy.response. I've already done a lot of work to minimize this by looking them up once and binding to a local, for example, request = cherrypy.request, and then looking up further attributes using the local name. But perhaps there's more to be done.

The last line above shows 1 msec being used to call the builtin getattr() function. Seems we have a very object-oriented style.

I'll keep looking for ways to get any of those 0.001's to read 0.000. Perhaps now that I've moved profiling to WSGI middleware, I can aggregate times and work with numbers that have a little more precision.

Just got back last night from a two-day tournament in Sylmar, CA. It was over 100 degrees on both days while we were competing (competing for 7 hours a day in that!). I think I got a bit of heat stroke and I have decided that I don't like playing disc golf in weather over 85 degrees. I was in 3rd place going into the final round and ended up in 8th place after my body broke down from the heat. Boo! The last round cost me something like $150 and I ended up winning just $80 with the 8th place tie!

Stats from the tournament will be put up here hopefully in the next few days.

Good things from this weekend were that I did well enough to play on the leader card for 3 rounds with Steve Rico, who is the best disc golfer in California and of the best in the world. Also, San Diego represented very well and won 4 or 5 divisions along with many other good placings.

Next is the Waller Pines Pro Open tournament in a couple weeks. It won't be 100 degrees there since it is north of Santa Barbara near the coast so that is something to look forward to!

foto by Tam. foto editing by me.

While at my office I often eat cereal for breakfast while I'm working at 7:30 or so in the morning. This morning my brain must be really off because I poured the cereal into my water glass and didn't realize I was doing it until a considerable amount was floating in my water. Genius!

It's official. I am now the owner of www.thephotocult.net. There isn't anything up yet, but this is the first major step towards establishing the cult! Can't wait!

Also the photocult is having an outing tonight. Attendees committed so far are TamLeeps, KatieGardener, Doug, JustinKerr, and myself. We will be heading down to the GasLamp district for a night session, should get some great material!

P.S. If you are downtown tonight and you see a bunch of hip kids walking around with tri-pods and camera bags, be sure to holler out a "Viva la Cult" or something to that effect, you might even see your mug on www.aesthetic-mindset.com! Who knows?