Optimism is essential when trying to do anything difficult because difficult things often take a long time – Jeff Bezos

It’s summer, and the heat is getting to me. It’s getting to Dreamhost too (1, 2, 3); they’ve suffered a few power outages, each resulting in severe, cascading failures. Running a service is painful, growing is painful, and they’re feeling a bunch of both.

I’ve noticed that even when things are running smoothly at Dreamhost that my site is slow. Dog slow. Today, I’m seeing front page load times of 5-10 seconds. Now that’s not all Dreamhost’s fault: Wordpress is sucking back the query time against the database (on a network with continual latency issues). And Wordpress is fat, onioned with layers of abstractions. So both Wordpress and Dreamhost are sucking. Of course my site design part of Wordpress’s suckage too: the front page here does 3 different ’story’ queries, which results in some absurd combination of queries (66 in total).

I’m impressed at how quickly a set of reasonable things can become unreasonable. Dreamhost, Wordpress, and my site layout only take 2-3 seconds to generate on a good day. On a bad day like today, it’s 5-10 seconds. And on a post-California-blackout day, it can be 60+ seconds. That’s the problem with suck: when things go all to shit, they get there quickly.

I have to say that I’ve been tempted to revert to a more primative system: plain-old HTML, some simple PHP (or Perl) setup, or a simpler tool ([Blosxom]?). But does that really fix anything? I keep on finding myself back at this point, asking if I should write it myself. Should I? I don’t want to, and yet I do. I’d love to replace what I have with less suck, but everything else sucks somehow too. And I don’t really want to reinvent the suck.

Suck is the balance. On the good days the suck hides waiting. On the bad days it’s out in full force, in your face, sucking the life out of you. But then again it’s been hot out, I haven’t been sleeping, and I’m grumpy. Maybe things suck less than I think, and I should shut up and do something interesting.

On Being and Deliciousness, with Wil Shipley, a compelling interview with the recently-sacked CEO of the Omni Group.

A Flickr summary of the Web2.0-ization parody of company logos linked by Kottke yesterday.

Another 37Signals insight: Writing words vs. writing software, a comparison of writing software and writing prose.

A choice quoted quote:

“Books aren’t written - they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.” -Michael Crichton

Rewriting isn’t always bad. The software industry just needs to learn to accept it as part of the process of improvement. Rewriting shouldn’t prevent finishing the damned thing, though. Not that I’ve ever seen that before.

Another great writer’s quote from the article:

“Remember this: Don’t spend too much time visiting writing groups. You are not writing then. You are writing when you are WRITING.”

Reading your RSS feeds IS NOT WRITING SOFTWARE. Back to work I guess …

Tim Bray’s review of Ruby. Reasonable conclusions too.

You don’t choose your passions, your passions choose you. — Jeff Bezos

From the OLS 2006 Keynote, Myths, Lies, and Truths about the Linux kernel.

Hey, here’s another thing I was thinking of developing this year.

How to do solvent transfers, something I’ve been meaning to learn to do.