Sorry about that. What? You didn’t notice that Losing it[1] was unavailable for a while? Well, I’m pleased to say that the free Pingdom service did notice, and sent me an alert. And a huge two people[1] mentioned it on Farcebook.

When I got back to my computer, I first checked to make sure it wasn’t a general Dreamhost problem. No point working on an SEP[2], is there? Well, there were no fresh problems reported, so I checked my sites. Both Tiggercam and this site were declining to load, so I knew it wasn’t something specific to anything on Losing it[1].

The next step was to log on to the Dreamhost control panel and see what my virtual server was doing. And what it was doing was not good at all. Total overload. The graph that shows “load” – an indication of how much processor power all the sites I host are using had leapt up from more or less “negligible” to “OMG” in a short space of time.

Well, I wasn’t going to be able to do much with the server in that state, so I clicked the magic buttons to make it reboot. It soon came back up and I could then log on to the console and have a look. It turned out that one site that I host for a friend[3] was getting a lot of attention. Running that site alone was taking around 20% of the CPU, and that was just after a reboot. We’ve had this problem before, when a sound file he had on a post got Dug[4], linked all over the place, and it looked like it was happening again.

As the site hasn’t been touched in quite a while[5], I took a backup copy of it then deleted it, adding a simple index file indicating that it’s not there any more. And once I’d done that, the graph returned to normal. Here it is after I’d rebooted and dropped the site:

Fixed!

[1] That’s not two huge people. My brother’s not that big, and the other gentleman is just the size he should be, I’m sure
[2] Someone Else’s Problem
[3] Hello, Mr Heron
[4] Digged? Whichever it was, it caused problems at the time…
[5] He seems to prefer Farcebook these days

OK, I admit it. I’m a camera geek[1]. While most of the time, I’m happy to use my Canon 5D MkII, and I love my little Olympus E-P1, that doesn’t stop me wanting to play with more photographic toys. But since a Leica M9 or any variety of Hasselblad would be a little more expensive than I could really justify at the moment, I decided to try something a little[2] less expensive, and indeed a little[3] less sophisticated:

New camera!

This is it. It’s a Holga 120N, which cost all of £40 including a couple of films. Yes, films. Light-sensitive material on rolls that you have to physically insert into the camera before taking pictures, then remove and pass to someone to perform chemistry on[4] before you can see what you’ve captured.

Holgas are strange beasts – cheaply (some would say badly) made, with plastic lenses and minimal controls (four distance settings, and a cloudy or bright setting). This is the most basic kind – there are some with built-in flash, but I decided to avoid that. No batteries, nothing other than a shutter release (with a dinky spring) and a wheel to advance that film stuff. Oh, and this is none of your fancy 35mm cartridge stuff – this is yer good old fashioned 120 roll film. You can get either 12 6cm x 6cm pictures or 16 6cm x 4.5cm exposures – you have to fit the appropriate lump of plastic inside before loading the film, then set a slider on the back to show the appropriate frame counter (the numbers are printed on the back of the film).

There’s an enthusiastic culture that’s built up around these cheap cameras, with lots of odd pictures on show at Lomography. It’s about as far as you can get from the precise images produced by today’s digital cameras, and that’s probably the attraction. It’s more organic, or something. Anyway, I got it to have a play, and to see what I can get out of it. I went for a wander with it at lunchtime, then dropped off the film for processing. I should get the quite probably dire results back tomorrow.

I’m expecting odd-looking pictures with signs of light leakage, fuzziness and vignetting. Or possibly just a general mess. All good fun, or something!

[1] That’s in addition to being a general-purpose geek, and any other kind of geek I might be, of course
[2] Well, a lot, actually.
[3] Even more of a lot
[4] Some people prefer to do the chemical stuff themselves, but I recall how bad I always was at doing practicals in chemistry, so that won’t be me

Well, today’s weight will have to remain a mystery, unless batt translates into a number rather than a plea for power. I must remember to buy the poor thing a new battery tomorrow, then perhaps it will start giving useful[1] information again.

Today’s picture is another one from Sunday. This is a side view of the Sage, with a quite interesting memorial in front of it, taken from in front of St Mary’s.

Bit of a contrast

[1] Well, useful-ish