Wednesday: Pizza and things

I tried out that pizza place I mentioned on Monday.

Hm.  This looks like a Baker's Pride P46S commercial pizza oven.  Not that I'm a pizza oven expert or anything.  Just a pizza oven dilettante, really.

 So what does it look like?

Hm.  That's a bit less than promising.

The quick answer is: this place used to be the Hello Kitty store next to work.  I suspect it will be back to being a Hello Kitty store soon.  The big problem is that they bake up the pizzas, and then put them into a rotating pizza warmer until they sell.  This brings up the biggest flaw in things.  The warmer dries out the outer crust, to the point where it's inedible.  One slice felt like styrofoam, and snapped in half when I tried to flex it.

Next, being "kind of warm" for so long draws the oil out of the cheese and pepperoni.  This in turn sinks down into the bottom crust, causing that to be soggy and floppy.  The sauce is overly sweet, resulting in the "tastes like ketchup" other people were describing.  The combination of all this makes for fundamentally bad pizza, and the worst part is that the thin soggy bottom crust makes it kind of a skimpy lunch.

So, given the $9.42 I paid for this, versus the $7.46 I usually pay at Boston's (for the pepperoni and mushroom), I personally can't wait for the Hello Kitty store to return.

And then I drew pictures about how the eigenvalues in principle component analysis relate to how the input data is structured, in a qualitative way.

Finally, I discovered today that the load on my DVR/firewall/storage computer was 23.  Poking at it showed that a cronjob for php that runs every 30 minutes wasn't completing, because the lsof call that it makes wasn't finishing.  It'd been doing this since about 7am this morning.  Poking at lsof showed that it magically got better when I restarted apache.  Ok.  Next thing, netstat -a, which showed that some jackass at "58.ifastnet.com" was attempting a denial-of-service attack against my webserver, by doing a SYN flood.  This creates lots of entries in the netstat results, and because of these open connections, lsof wasn't completing, causing the initial problem.  My "I don't have fucking time for this bullshit" was to disable port 80 connections to the web server, since I don't use that port for things anyway.  So, hey there ifastnet!  Either you're scamming shitbags, or you're incompetent and let people run DOS attacks from your servers.  Good job sucking at life, whichever it is!

• Also, if you do this on your webpage, I also hate you.  When I hit space, I want the text to scroll, not "put a space in some fucking login box." 
• More on SYN attacks.
• Squirrel vs. cat.
• "I mean, just look at my hands!"
• Arbok and Weezing.