Posted on April 11, 2008 Posted by John Scalzi 23 Comments
So, yesterday Scalzi.com experienced a bit of technical trouble. Using the graph below, can you tell approximately when this trouble occurred?
Take your time. It may not be obvious at first.
Taunting the tauntable since 1998
John Scalzi, proprietor – JS
Athena Scalzi, contributor – AMS
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I’m gonna go out on a limb and say the 11th-12th. Just guessing here.
I find charts and graphs confusing.
Yet they provide a comforting reassurance that others know what’s going on. Perhaps that’s why I voted for Ross Perot.
But don’t worry, because it looks like it only crapped out on you at your peak usage time.
It looks like, at 14h, everyone hit the site to catch up on whatever they missed during the outage. ;-) Go, surfers, go!
There was no outage. There was an atheist gathering at Starbucks for lunch.
Dude… You’re kind of busy at the Zero Hour.
I’m sorry, I’m not seeing it; what am I looking for again?
My site totals look like that, once you remove the two zeroes on the ends of the numbers on the vertical part on the side.
OK… once you remove the three zeroes etc….
I don’t seen an outage there, all right?
Everything looks alright to me.
The Executive Committee of The Official Ghlaghghee Fan Club has identified the outrage. It was not difficult.
The outrage has now lasted for months. Where are the pictures of Our Magnificent Lady?!?! This outrage cannot be allowed to continue. Nor outage.
The Official Ghlaghghee Fan Club
If you stare at the chart for a while and let your eyes lose focus, it turns into a saillboat.
All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth, my two front teeth…
David #12
That was pretty much the same response I had when I first glanced at it. :)
Line graph, pie graph, bar graph, Michael Strahan graph…
I work in IT. I don’t see any problem at all in that graph.
(Whiny users!)
Methinks it’s a strike of the Immanent Justice (TM) after the infamous “Big Idea”…
Huh. So that’s what the singularity looks like in real time.
Dr. Phil
While the gap between 1045 and 1315 is clearly long and troubling, I’d be much more concerned about the systematic outages every hour between xx45 and xx15. Whatever the problem is, it may be costing you up to half your traffic!
…Oh, you say, it’s just that the bars in the bar chart aren’t the full width of the bin. That doesn’t seem like a very good chart design. Here, the data is so regular that you can get away with it, because the viewer can deduce the bins and the bars’ relationship to them. But what if you have irregular binning? Are the bars aligned to the center or the beginning of the bin? What if the bins aren’t aligned to the graph tick marks?
And what does Tufte say?
I want my embedded sparkline graph, that’s what he’d be saying.
When the Bacon arrived?
Tied to that Chad Orzel post and folks clicking back to check on your post about whathisname author on The Big Idea.
If I had to guess, and stuff.
No, it had to do with general server problems at my host company. It didn’t have anything to do with what was here, content-wise.
Well, obviously it was at 14h, after all the Whatever readers attended the big 3-hour Worldwide Scalzi Fan Synchronous Meetup Lunch (with drinks) then came back and all hit the blog at the same time to see what they missed…
Just so you know what *really* happened.
– yeff
Good comments! I love wit disguised as idiocy!