http://ny1.com/9-staten-island-news-content/top_stories/108806/costumed-culprits-caught-on-tape

This isn't the way to promote your new game!!!!!

I can't stop laughing, Luigi's just standing there until Mario's like "Luigi, come-a help-a me!!! He told me our Princess is in another castle."

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

tashabear, the wife of my friend who has been hospitalized with H1N1 has given me permission to elaborate on the situation. Here is the summary, in her own words:

You can talk about it, Spunky. Maybe his story will get others to pay attention to their health and get vaccinated when it comes available. I can't even express how frightening this experience has been, and believe me, none of you want to go through it.

The quick and dirty: My husband, darkwolfie, got sick a few days after we returned from a long weekend at Disney. I did too, but I just had a lousy cold. He called it, he knew he had H1N1, and he just got progressively worse till he had to go to the hospital. He was admitted to our local hospital on October 28, which was a Wednesday.

By Friday morning, he was having such difficulty breathing that he had to be put under sedation and intubated, and his breathing assisted by a ventilator. He fought the vent the entire time. His blood oxygen levels (aka "O2 sats") were never that great, and he would occasionally spike fevers. They were never able to drop the oxygen level he was breathing below 90% for any decent length of time.

They made the decision to take him from out local hospital to Massachusetts General on Saturday November 7th, and of course, that was a bit of a rigmarole, because the ambulance didn't have the ventilation support that he needed, so he had to be transported via LifeFlight. (I told them that he'd be disappointed to miss a chopper ride -- he's a real aviation buff.) Ten minutes after he arrived at the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) at MGH, they administered paralytics and heavier sedation so he'd stop fighting the vent. In other words, they put him in a drug-induced coma.

Yesterday, they did an echocardiogram (ultrasound imaging of his heart) to make sure that his heart was not damaged due to the edema he's been experiencing and the stress of his illness. They didn't get an ideal picture, as he was not tolerating being turned on his side very well, but they think his heart is doing fine. They also administered nitric oxide to try to dilate his airways and improve his O2 sats, and that worked for a little while, and then... not so much.

At 9:00 this morning, they called me and said that they thought he should be placed on ECMO, and let the machine take over the job of oxygenating his blood, so that his lungs could rest and heal. (That article is sort of a downer; just read it for the technical bits.) They got me right out of bed, and I was there by 10:40. I got to visit with him for about an hour, and then they kicked me out so they could do the procedure. ECMO is often administered to neonates (preemies), so Wolfie's procedure was done by a pediatric surgeon -- I meant to ask him if it was a nice break for him to work on such large blood vessels after working on tiny babies all the time.

He tolerated the procedure well, and was okay when I left. The next 24 hours will be rugged as they get all the settings figured out, but I have faith in his medical team, and all the faith in the world in him, and more gratitude than I can express for all the love and support and prayers and good thoughts that are flowing to us from people who only vaguely know who we are.

I can't be choosy. Disseminate this as widely as you like to get more prayers and more good thoughts for him. He is my whole world, and a good friend to so many, and we just want him well and home.

Please keep praying for them; she updates their journals regularly with information regarding his condition. I really just want to see him get better and come home to her. They are truly wonderful people, and some of the first people I've ever had the pleasure of knowing in this community.

spunkywulf has already said it here but I'm going to say it again. Please keep our friend in your prayers as he goes through some serious treatments today to get his lungs working again due to H1N1 complicated by Pneumonia. He's a strong guy with a loving wife and they are too perfect a couple for anything to separate them, but good healing thoughts and prayers can only help him pull through sooner.

I've been so out of touch with my old friends up in Massachusetts since I moved. I hate that it takes something like this to remind me how much I care and how important people are in my life.

A friend of mine has H1N1 and is currently hospitalized in critical condition. I don't wish to elaborate further as it isn't my place to do so, but to any of you who are the praying type... please, please put in a prayer for him. He's a fantastic person, and one Tough Cookie, as is his wife. They're weathering this best as they can right now and any prayers would be greatly appreciated.

so a friend proposed five questions for me, these are hers... if you want me to ask five, then, well, you know what to do

1. What do you view as your biggest achievement? to be where i am through consistant hard work... to be in an engineers union, after having a ged... to still be standing while others have came, went and done their best to hurt me is an accomplishment in itself

2. What do you view as your biggest regret? getting others involved in a violent self destructie lifestyle, seeing the damage ive done to them and we all did to others is unbearable... i was a man on fire and thought since the world wounded me, it was my right to stomp on it as hard as i wanted

3. Where is your favorite place to go to unwind, and why? i dont really unwind anymore, even in the bars, im preforming, joking and acting the goon... im very tightly wound

4. What do you miss the most from your childhood? i dont miss those days at all, im happy to live through it and dont like to think about it

5. What is your favorite NY Rangers memory? the first time being at the garden, seeing how big and fast those men were is amazing... to see that beautiful glowing sheet of ice fthe first time is something ill never forget... the rangers lost that game,

New Comic is up! Sorry for the delay.