Better Living Through Introspection

Um, whaaaa? Ubuntu (which readers of this blog should recognize as a flavor of Linux) is apparently the newest rallying cry for the Celtics!

Can you name the Boston Celtics’ new rallying cry? It’s something the team chants…not the fans.

The word is “Ubuntu.” It comes from the Bantu languages of Southern Africa and means, loosely, “I am because of you.”

WBUR’s Martha Bebinger explains.

According to Twitter:

It looks like we were spot-on with our estimate of ten times the normal traffic today. Our preparations held and Twitter stayed up. Only one unexpected disruption occurred and that was a network problem in our data center which caused a few minutes of service disruption some time after Steve Jobs’ keynote. With that single disruption, our uptime during the event was 97.3%.

And yet, I can’t tell you how many times I saw the damn Whale while trying to use Twitter yesterday during the WWDC keynote. I’m not a Twitter hater, but I’d like to see them not boast about their uptime stats as a sole success metric. After all, up and serving error pages is not the same as up and serving a usable application.

Whoops! Proving that I myself am not error-free, I went back and re-read their post before saving this one…turns out the Whale was served 4% of the time during the peak load:

About 4% of requests during this time did return the page that asks folks to wait a few minutes and try again. However, we learned a lot during this stress test and that will translate to better performance down the line.

Dodged that bullet.

On a slightly related note: Save the whales!.

New “The Daily Show” correspondent Wyatt Cenac thinks the Democratic primaries are as boring as the second season of “Lost.”

A polar bear on a tropical island? There are SO many reasons that is amazing!

Well, it’s official. I’m surprised it lasted this long — usually the comedies that appeal to me tend to be short-lived; or, at least, sentimental looks back tend to make it seem that way (except for “Cheers,” man, did that show drag ass). But finally, one of my current favorites, “How I Met Your Mother” appears to have taken a turn for the worse.

I won’t discuss it directly so as not to introduce any spoilers for you TiVo users, but if the show continues with the plot line from the end of last night’s episode, I’m going to have difficulty watching it.

Oh, and in case you’re not familiar with the phrase, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia’s surprisingly accurate explanation:

The term jumping the shark alludes to a specific scene in a 1977 episode of the TV series Happy Days when the popular character Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli literally jumps over a shark while water skiing. The scene was so preposterous that many believed it to be an ill-conceived attempt at reviving the declining ratings of the flagging show. The phrase has become a colloquialism used by U.S. TV critics and fans to denote the point at which the characters or plot of a TV series veer into a ridiculous, out-of-the-ordinary storyline.

It’s not my favorite phrase, but it works.