Currently my web servers were fra.lemis.com and arn.lemis.com. And for over a
day, fra's load average was round 200, while arn was an acceptable 4 or so.
OK, on with the planned location change. Honolulu? No, they don't offer my choice
of VM there. Seattle? OK, do that.
And bang! The load shot up to 200 again. Not what I was expecting. OK, where else? None
of the third world locations seemed appropriate. How about down the road in Melbourne? Did that, and the load seemed
normal. Here a screen shot of my top displays:
That needs enlargement to be understood, but we have the following VMs:
Server
Load average
lax
0.37
Not active
fra
3.65
arn
1.64
sea
154.31
mel
0.55
All these servers have the same basic parameters: Vultr code vc2-2-2gb (2 “CPUs”, 2 GB memory,
80 GB NVMe storage). That looks fairly conclusive, but it doesn't account for random
fluctuations. Turned off the www pointing to sea. We'll seasee
what happens, in particular of the load on the other servers increases.
While in town, Yvonne went to VicRoads and had her concession applied,
apparently without any difficulties. That's a load off my mind.
Of course, it's due twice a year. She was given a form for transferring the Holden into my
name, requiring a fee of $47.50. That annoys me, especially since there's a box (not
ticked) next to the same, saying “exempt”. How can we get an exemption? Do I care? Just
not having to deal with them continually is worth more than $50.
Yvonne returned from shopping with a camera I had bought last
week: my fourth Olympus Pen,
an Olympus Pen EE-S, serial number 256316.
Why? Sentimental value. My mother had one decades ago, and I had to do with it on occasion. It's a pretty little thing,
and much smaller than the modern cameras that carry that name. Here the EE-S on the left
and the E-PM1 on the right with a comparable lens:
Yes, the E-PM1 has an interchangeable lens, but its image size is only half that of the
EE-S. And I don't know of a serious lens for it that is smaller. The body cap lenses are,
but they're toys, and arguably the result would still be bigger. Interestingly, though, the
combination weighs 370 g, compared with 385 for the EE-S.
And the controls? There's a focus ring, barely visible round the lens itself, and another
ring close to the body. That one's really confusing: turn it to different positions to set
aperture, ISO speed (10 to 200 ASA only), or aperture again for flash:
The scales that Yvonne bought some bathroom scales in January—in fact, 4 of them to ensure that one might be relatively accurate. So
she chose the least accurate one, because it showed the lowest weight.
But last week the battery (a CR2032) ran out. That's fast for that kind of battery. Changed it, but it still didn't work.
Failed already. So today she bought a new one. Remove insulation strip, try it out. It
failed before the first reading! A bit of messing around in the battery compartment (again
needing screwdrivers, though they're AAA cells) got it to work again and
give varying results, between 200 g below and 300 g above my scales. I'm not convinced.
Made Sichuan cabbage stir-fry again today. That's about the third time, but it could be the last. It doesn't taste bad,
but somehow it's boring. Part of it could be that the Doubanjiang that I bought last month was not the right kind. It seems that for Sichuan food I need Pixian doubanjiang,
not the milder type that I had bought. But I don't know if that would have saved the dish.
As planned, I took sea.lemis.com off the list for www.lemis.com overnight.
Did it make any difference? Not much. Reenable it. Load average shot up to (only) round
100. That difference could be due to the external load.
OK, it looks like sea is toast. But Vultr offers an additional, expensive
service: for $10 a month (half the cost of the server) they will protect against DDoS. Will that help? There's only one way
to find out, and running it for a day will cost about 32 ¢, so I did that. We'll see
tomorrow.
Just by chance, saw another Olympus Pen EE-S for sale on
eBay today. OK, I can watch it. And it sold
for $14.11! Admittedly, there was postage as well, and eBay seem to have added a (generous)
10% “Buyer Protection fee”, so the total came to $35.49, but that's less than half what I
paid. I was happy that the seller accepted my offer for the camera, bringing it down in
price by almost $20, but it almost looks as if I shouldn't have. Grrr.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
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but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
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