Bagel Belly Blog

The long weekend

Ah, the joys of the British bank holiday. Despite forecasts to the contrary, it didn't actually rain, and was in fact gloriously sunny most of the time. I spent the time split between socialising and nursing a sick Tomcat / Cocoon install.

The site in question was reeling under what amounted to a denial of service as sixteen different search crawlers indexed it at once. There was no time to get a caching proxy in place in front of it, but some tweaks to the Tomcat and Cocoon configs were enough to keep the site up and responsive. It handled around a quarter of a million hits each day of the weekend.

On Saturday night, after a day of gardening, I met up with a bunch of people in Norwich. We eventually headed to Optic which is usually a great place to spend a relaxing evening. This week was different: one of my female friends was victim of some unwelcome advances from a complete stranger, who didn't seem to like her telling him off and staring him down. In the end she left the dance floor, and when he tried to follow I had to step into his path and ask him to leave her alone. He didn't take too kindly to this, and decided I was his enemy instead.

He squared up to me, looking for a fight, and seemed quite disappointed when I calmly and politely told him to leave my friend alone, whilst firmly restraining him. His terrified-looking friend then hauled him away as the rest of my friends and I made a sharp exit from the dancefloor, before the nutter got over his surprise and decided to start a fight regardless. About 30 seconds later my insides dissolved in a rush of panic and adrenaline. Thankfully, the rest of the evening passed without incident.

On Sunday I caught up on some reading, then a few of us met up for Squash and Badminton, followed by a party in the evening. Yesterday we all met up for lunch, and then spent the afternoon basking in the sunshine and relaxing. Then something exciting and amazing happened in the evening: more on that another time.