Over my career, I had settled on UAL as my carrier of choice. Flying out of SFO for the first 4.5 years in the US meant that UAL was the primary choice to get anywhere. After a while, I became a devoted UAL fan when I realized that in this day of limited overhead bin room having Premier status got you the vaunted 1 on your boarding pass.

I could accept that First-Class and 1K flyers got to board ahead of me – hell, they’re on a first-name basis with most of the flight crews. This didn’t bother me because I knew that I got to board next.

Friday, that changed.

Apparently, the rule is that Premier Executive now rates between the Red Doormat Club and the Premier status flyers.

I have commented in the past about how people who travel a great deal assume too much from their airline frequent-flyer plans. I do not want to become one of these people. All I ask is that this single privilege I had grown accustomed to having be re-instated. I know my travel money doesn’t have a huge effect on your bottom-line, but I stuck with you through thick and thin.

But now this is a really thick move, and my patience has grown thin.

Full Story here.

There is this small news event occurring this week, called the Democratic National Convention.

And what are you showing tonight?

John Denver, a man and his music.

Are you completely clueless?

Another year, another lack of donations from me.

When will you start showing the programs we want to see, and stop with the crap you think raises you the most money?

This is an ongoing rant.

People are recommending the CBC feed. I would likely say the people in the UK would recommend the BBC feed. But I can tell you one thing: Samantha and I have boycotted this year’s Olympics.

If there is an interesting event, or final, I will search out the video. But the idea of watching the jingoistic, materialist, flag-waving, US-centric view of the Olympics makes me ill. I don’t like the Chinese regime for a variety of reasons; but the idea of having the US Olympic team shoved down my throat by NBC while McDonalds and Coke sell me a new world is enough to make anyone give up tv forever.

Rant Off.

UPDATE: Seems Henry Blodget has a similar opinion, with less rant. [here]

But, the catch was: the problem persisted when I tried to use Wordpress 2.5.1. Hmmm…wonder what’s up.

So today, I started thinking that it might be an Apache issue, rather than a Wordpress issue. So, taking a break from a massive project I’m doing (only so much performance data you can process before brain freeze), I started to poke around.

AllowOverride All

That did it. I was not letting Apache read the damn .htaccess file that Wordpress installed.

Excuse the thudding of my head on the desk.

Many apologies to the Automattic team. This user haz th dumb.

About 10 days ago, I turned GrabPERF loose on Twitter. Now before you accuse this of crippling the service and bringing it to its knees, realize that GrabPERF simply requests a document over HTTP about two times a minute. No additional requests are made for images and the like.

In the ocean of requests coming into the Twitter systems, the GrabPERF requests are like individual water molecules being added to the pool.

The above graph shows performance for the last 24 hours. The purple dots are errors. Complete details, and a dynamically updating graph, can be found here.

Now that I have had a chance to show off, I will leave the Twitter team in peace. I am not a developer or a systems expert. I, like most people, rely on people with specialized skills to analyze and resolve the problem. There are many people on the Web who have taken on the challenge of reverse-engineering Twitter to try and determine how it does what it does, and how they would build a better mousetrap.

Ok. Go do it. Or shut up and let the Twitter team get down to the hard work of making this service work. Or volunteer to help them fix the problems.

The Twitter team has stated that they know how to resolve the issues that are at the heart of the performance issue. But as I said in a comment to @gapingvoid tonight, knowing what the solution is only makes up 15% of the application development process. Building, testing, deploying and verifying the solution takes 85% of the effort.

The Twitter team has a lot of work ahead of them. Buy them beer and pizza and let them get to it.

I have spent 9 years investigating, diagnosing, and validating the Web performance issues of companies. I can tear the Web performance data of a site down quickly and ask pointed questions about why certain components of an application are behaving poorly.

But even after 9 years, there are still gimme problems around connection setup that I can seem brilliant about, not because I have some secret knowledge, but because I think of Web performance from the Network UP, not from the Application DOWN.

The subtlety of this difference what Leinwand is alluding to. Fancy applications run across the Internet. The Internet is built on TCP. And TCP is built on-top of a very complex networking infrastructure that is way beyond the realm of my skills.

If you don’t know what packet loss looks like, or how your fancy app presents to clients, or how to ensure that this data is collected and presented to you in a timely way, then you are being exposed to alerting by client calls.

All because you thought the biggest problem was scaling your app, not ensuring that the network it crossed to reach people affected the way it performed. Network geeks created Web 1.0; Web 2.0 seems to think they are mostly unecessary.

Wrong.

Measure your performance. Understand TCP. Hire a network geek (or 20).

Then sleep better at night.

Go make your Outlook less excruciating.

I left town, essentially. Mentally. I had to go down a new path, find a new cause, lose that cause, explore more. Step away from the places I had known for so long.

I went into Typography. Architecture (Mid-Century Modern). Design. Photography.

And I come back refreshed. I come back being at least 6 months behind in M&A news, new products being flogged by Guy, in opinions expressed by Fred and Brad.

I can recommend it for anyone. I know that the people out there have become addicted to it all. But walking away from the constant need to be informed, to be in the game, on your game, it’s exhausting.

And when you mix in my bipolar (follow the category, young man), things can get really intense.

I will now be participating with fresh enthusiasm.

Staring into the spiraling madness of Silicon Valley and laughing, so glad I can watch from afar. Visit occasionally, but juts sit in the audience and let the lions fight it out.

So, what do I need to know?

Oh. If you want to follow me on twitter, I can guarantee sleep.