What Happened
Yet another solid 7 hours of sleep. What luck! Only downside is that I dreamed that this bird I used to know (which died) came back to life and bit me on the finger. The whole thing made me a little anxious when I woke up. The morning was pretty normal, and I headed off to work.
(This paragraph is technical, so feel free to skip it) Now, at work I regularly connect this system to do certain things as I have many programs on this system that I don't have at work. Generally the connection is pretty fast, and there isn't a problem. Today for some reason it seemed a little choppy, but I didn't take special note until I got a message from a friend saying that the site was not working well, and then I noticed that I couldn't even get to it. Weird. Listing the HTTP connections to my web server showed probably 50 active connections. Ummmmm..., usually I have either one or none. A quick check of the logs showed that I was getting hammered, and for some reason Apache was giving up. It wasn't maxing out the bandwidth, and I have no idea why. It was using a good 120MB of RAM, which is about 110MB more than usual. I killed the server, moved the files to a faster harddrive, stopped other test sites from running, Changed the thumbnails so that they were only about a third the size, and then restarted it temporarily. I then installed the Windows XP SP2 TCP/IP connections fix to bump up how quickly it would take in new connections, although that didn't look like the problem. I also restarted my system with less programs running to give it a fighting chance. After that, it seemed to be much happier.
Around 9:30 am today a link was posted on a rather popular website that resulted in many, many people checking this site. An hour later, a link was posted on a rather popular Yahoo Groups site that resulted in many, many more people landing here. Exact numbers are a pain to get, but suffice it to say many thousands of visitors came to the Orange Man Project today, resulting in a web site that just wanted to curl up and die. I've changed a few things, so if anything like this happens in the near future, it will be fine. Hopefully.
Unfortunately, I also missed class because of this as I was trying to get it all sorted out. It's sad because I really like my Tuesday class. But, I did get to see the ring that my roommate just bought. The rock is over a carat, and altogether I think it is a $7500 ring (almost as much as I made last year). Now, I don't know much about rings, but I'm pretty sure I could buy a server for the Orange Man Project that would never go down under stress. Talk about some serious bling! Oh, if you know my roommate, don't tell anyone. It's a secret. His girlfriend isn't supposed to know until he proposes. So shhhhhh!
I also got many emails saying a variety of things from, "way to go!" all the way to "you're going to get Vitamin A poisoning and die!" And amongst them I found this little gem.
Some years ago when I was still living in Seattle, I knew the guy who ran the Cold Mountain Juice Factory (who made great carrot juice and distributed it in the area). He was fairly orange when I knew him and, he said, he'd been a bright orange a year before, all because of the quantity of carrot juice he was drinking (about a quart a day when I knew him and up to 1/2 gallon a day before). He bicycled everywhere and was in great health, but you could see that he was orange from quite a ways away. His hair, which was normally brown, had a very slight green tint to it as well as a result of the extra pigmentation.
A few people (including a claimed doctor) suggested juicing the carrots for maximum effectiveness. That's good, because that is just what I had planned. To Laura, I like orange jello, but I can't eat it even if it has shredded carrots in it. To the German that sent me the topless picture of himself, ummmmm....thanks....
Eating Schedule
3 raw carrots is becoming pretty regular for me in the mornings. But what isn't regular is that I managed to remember to bring 3 carrots with me to work today. I think I ate 2 of them, and forgot the other with the chaos. After fixing my system around 5:00 pm, I decided to try juicing some carrots.
I got 5 raw carrots and then cut them down the middle so they would be thin enough to fit in the juicer.
The carrot goes in here
and comes out here. I don't really understand what goes on in the middle, so don't ask.
5 carrots is enough to make a single glass of carrot juice. Notice the thin, creamy head at the top. When you juice things like apples, you get a really thick head, which is good for some, not so good for others. If I had a straw I would probably blow bubbles to fake a bigger head. Overall the juice was pretty tasty, but it is hard for me to drink because I have to many bad memories from doing a "juice fast" with my roommate. To explain, here is a shot of the juice he made when I was done, consisting of carrots, spinach, and red bell peppers.
Don't even get me started.
How I Felt
Pretty good. With the carrots there I didn't even get hungry during the day. My head is of course a little groggy, but that is to be expected. One, possibly unrelated, item is that I got a crick in my neck around noon that still hurts a little. It's actually less around my neck than in my left back shoulder near my neck. One of those muscles that connects to the neck I think. I need a massage. Oh yeah, that smell in my pee is gone now. Yipee! Must have been the garlic.
Weight Measurement
235.0 lbs this evening. I blame the lack of steamed carrots. Let's try going without steamed carrots for a few more days just to be sure, shall we? Okay, sleepy time now because I have to get up hella early to get down to San Antonio.