Even Amazon.com goes down sometimes…
I ran into two new Amazon.com errors this morning:
Amazon.com Timeout
Something about your request to Amazon.com caused our server to take a long time … longer than we would like. So, we automatically stopped the program. Please try again.
It seems something’s wrong at my old place of work; obviously I can’t tell what it is from here, but I’m certainly annoyed that I can’t pricematch HL2 at the moment. I guess Amazon has more downtime than a regular consumer probably will ever notice. The second error I get is when I try to access an Obidos detail page:
We’re sorry!
An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re already working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly.
If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
on the Amazon.com home page
When I go to a Gurupa page, it loads quite snappily, leading me to believe that they’re doing something with Obidos. I don’t honestly know much about either technology–google for more. Hope it gets fixed soon.
Update: Major news media have picked up on this. If only they read my blog.
Sony Viao FS-790: A Review
I recently bought a Sony FS-790 with the following specs:
- 2.0 GHz P-M
- 1.5GB RAM
- NVIDIA 6400Go
- 120GB Hard Drive
- DVD R/W
- 15″ Widescreen
- Built in 802.11g
The system is great. The display is super brite, the battery lasts 4 to 4.5 hours, depending on what kind of use (word processing v.s. watching movies), and the graphics card is fairly powerful. The form factor is great, too. It’s large, but very slim and light. Here’s a photograph of it next to my old Dell Inspiron 8200, which it really puts to shame:
One thing, however, which is somewhat deceptive is that you don’t get your entire 120 GB hard disk to yourself. Sony steals away 6 GB for a restore partition:
So, unless you want to screw around with your hard drive partitions, you’re really getting around 110GB. Here are the 3DMark results, for those are interested:
3DMark Score 2977 3DMarks GT1 - Wings of Fury 113.1 FPS GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 16.9 FPS GT3 - Troll's Lair 15.7 FPS GT4 - Mother Nature 20.4 FPS CPU Score 753 CPUMarks CPU Test 1 90.5 FPS CPU Test 2 12.3 FPS Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 693.0 MTexels/s Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 1331.7 MTexels/s Vertex Shader 12.8 FPS Pixel Shader 2.0 42.8 FPS Ragtroll 10.5 FPS No sounds 45.1 FPS 24 sounds 39.1 FPS 60 sounds 0.0 FPS
Discover’s Two Covers
I came across two different Discover covers for the most recent issue, one in black the other in white:
Makes me wonder if they issued one, and then found that the other design sold better?
Takeoff to Landing: A Flickr Photoset
On my way from Ithaca to Seattle, I thought that it might be fun to take pictures the whole way out the window. So, I did, documenting takeoff, landing, and in-flight. You can view the set titled Flight to Seattle over at Flickr: here are a few sample photos:
Halloween Pumpkin Carver (Flash)
If you want to try carving up some virtual pumpkins in time for this year’s Halloween, try this flash applet. It even simulates candle light flicker:
Sexy Costumes From sassy to sexy, Halloween Express offers costumes for all sizes and all price ranges.