waiting for the...

That's what I call it when one day you're looking at the leafless trees of early Spring, and then...suddenly...without warning...FOOMP! Every leaf in the Northern Hemisphere says "HERE I AM!", and the trees are magically transformed to greeny goodness.

It's unpredictable. No one knows exactly when it'll happen, but everyone does the "when-the-hell-did-that-happen?" double take when it does. It usually happens when you least expect it, and definitely when you aren't looking... hence the WTHDTH look.

For us, it's happened coming home from the annual Spring trip to my brother-in-law's in Boston, or on the way home from a Lions Club state convention. I think one time it happened on our way home from South Carolina... which was pretty cool given the whole distance and climate change.

Well, I welcome the FOOMP!, as it's the sure way to know that Spring is just teasing us.

a little nervous

Tonight, I'm doing a live test of an e-mail throttling script I wrote for the Boy Scout council website I've been working on since 2001 (along with a bunch of other Scouters). I'll admit that I'm a bit nervous about the test.

About a month ago, the monthly email notifier went out to over 1700 subscribers in about 3 minutes. This broke my web host's e-mail speed limit, and ended up causing the website account to be suspended (under suspicion of spamming). After about an hour on the phone, I was able to convince the host that we were not spammers, and to reinstate the account.

They agreed to my solution to throttle the email delivery, and to run the process in the wee hours, while server activity is low.

Well, tonight is the test... and I'm really hoping it goes well.... otherwise, I'm going to find myself back on the phone, groveling for another chance.

UPDATE: Okay, a minor glitch on the reporting script, but it worked. whew!

i've got to get to doing this more often

almost a month. dammit.

Okay, so much for blogging on a more regular basis. My problem is that I get too busy, too much on the code groove, and then, POW! A month has gone by. I need to think less about what I am blogging about, at least the planning on what I am blogging about, and just type something... okay, but it's got to make sense... and cost me less than a therapist.

Lots of work going on from all angles... so I'm going to get to it.