On an unexpected day off, I drove north to the Skagit River Valley and Deception Pass. A beautiful if uneventful hike. Despite the popularity of this area, I was completely alone on some of the trails that lead away from the bridge. A few really scary cliffs made it fairly interesting.

Something a little weird happened though when I stepped onto the the North Beach. The first wave that greated me contained a rose that looked pretty fresh. Dropped from the bridge? Tossed into Skagit Bay as a memorial to the boy who died there this week? Or dropped on that very beach after a couple’s visit? Anyway, it was interesting.

You can see more pictures in my Flickr Deception Pass photo set.

A crude topo map of the region I hiked (click on the image to see a larger version)

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Most of the prices in the Seattle area are $3.30+ a gallon and this site graphically displays gas prices per county updated in real time. You can zoom down on your individual locales. Pretty cool. The map that is, not the outrageous gas prices.

The database migration initially went well but now we’ve started experiencing some serious operational issues and I won’t be around until this are fixed.

Yeah, my server has been offline quite a bit today. My initial thought was that it was an overheating problem at the data center but further analysis has revealed that Apache is writing everything it does to the error log even if it is able to serve up the file. This is ok for a while until the log reaches a few gigs in size, fills up physical memory, fills up swap, then the machine just locks up hard. This is extremely strange behavior and I have know idea why it just started doing this at 1:08 am last night.

A great way to begin my break, eh.

*sigh*

So now that the database migration is over, I have no purpose.

Ok, I probably do but I just can’t think of it right now. Also, I’m busy doing things that I totally neglected during the migration run up. Take a shower, shave, mow the grass, a whole slew of things that need to be done all the time. Not to mention the crap I let slip at work, lol. My employees will appreciate the disappearance of my beard that’s for sure.

Anyway, I’m taking a few days off to just slack and maybe do some crazy ass hikes so I can replace all of my current problems with some fun new ones.