February 2015 – Page 2 – Ramana's Musings

I Am Fallible!

The unthinkable happened. Much to the astonishment of the POW and his consort, Mr. Perfect goofed up.

I left home yesterday without my set of keys and on returning home would have been in a great deal of trouble had the POW not been at home to open the door for me. Eight years ago was the last time this had happened and I had promptly got a duplicate set made and left it with my nephew who used to live just about a hundred meters away from us. Alas. he died two years ago and since then, I have not made any alternate arrangement. Time to think about that too.

I must be getting senile!

Thoppukkaranam.

I had written about this four years ago but this has again been brought to my notice by a dear friend Narasimha.

When I was a wee lad, like along with other mischievous lads I used to get punished for various acts of omission and commission with what was called ‘Thoppukkaranam’, at home as well as in school. Some times when two of us were involved in whatever mischief it was that we were up to, we were punished with double thoppukkaranam, which was for my to cross my hands and catch the other fellow’s two ears and for him to do likewise with mine, and then to perform the thoppukkaranm of performing what was essentially squats.

It was then discovered that this was not a punishment and many schools started to promote this as exercise for the brain.

It now transpires that this is now big business in the USA! It is called Super Brain Yoga.

Wah Capitalism!

I thank Narasimha for bringing this to my notice. He like me, fondly remembers being punished with this Super Brain Yoga.

Reunions.

Ranjan suddenly announced last night that instead of his usual Saturday night trysts, he was off to a different locale to attend a reunion with some colleagues from a company that no longer exists but where all of them worked together fifteen years ago!

One of my old colleagues from my Bengaluru days is coming to Mumbai in April and has been trying to organise a reunion of old colleagues currently resident in Mumbai and Pune while he visits.

My daughter in law went for a girls night out with her colleagues from a company where she worked ten years ago.

I have been attending many reunions with my classmates when one or more of come to Pune and those here organise a lunch or dinner and invite the locals. Besides that, when I was in Delhi, one of my classmates there organised a lunch with Delhi classmates to meet up with me. We also regularly meet once a year at some resort or the other to which I have not gone except for one last year which was close by at Lonavala.

The point is that everyone seems to be attending reunions of all sorts all over the place thanks to the very important tool the internet being available now. Long lost friends are catching up with each other, and family and other associations are getting revived through such reunions. I for one am glad to have been able to reestablish contacts with some old classmates and colleagues through such reunions. How about you?

Child Abuse.

This morning when I collected the newspapers at the door this headline screamed at me – Schoolgirl ‘gagged, raped’ on her way home. Almost on a daily basis we see news of some kind of child abuse all across our country but, from the image above, it is obvious that this is a universal phenomenon. There are stories of exploitation of the innocent by gangs that end up in trafficking too. Very often it is someone close to the child, say a relative or family friend or even school teacher who abuses the child. What is more galling is the often experienced cover up by families out of shame or fear and even government authorities for political reasons as in the case of the British scandal.

I am not a psychologist to be able to comment on the why this is happening but am a philosopher of sorts who wonders as to why as human beings we are unable to universally behave like other living beings do.

Only human beings can conceive of a reality beyond their body/mind/intellect complex. They find deeper meanings to life, become very creative in many fields, invent new useful things, explore the unknown etc, but behave in such a vile manner that I find it difficult to understand why they do these things.

All life forms instinctively go after food, shelter and progeny, but only human beings seem to be able to produce these aberrations that are so devoid of compassion that a trusting child is used to satisfy some primitive urge and or to criminally exploit, and often to protect from discovery even in the killing of an innocent life.

Things have come to such a stage that young parents of children now prevent older people from being friendly with young children, constantly afraid as to what the older person’s motives are. Mothers who think you are a paedophile for daring to glance or smile at her precious child are more the rule than the exception in public places. This is sad particularly for people like me who simply want to share the joy of childhood with the child and we have to curb our natural tendencies to be safer than sorry.

I wonder what this observer of human nature will now say if he ever reads my post.

Children are the future, because mankind is moving more and more towards infancy.
~ Milan Kundera

I think that quite a sizeable section of its male component is moving more towards psychopathy.
This topic was suggested by Ashok for the weekly Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium where currently eight of us write on the same topic every Friday. I hope that you enjoyed my contribution to that effort. The seven other bloggers who write regularly are, in alphabetical order, Ashok, gaelikaa, Lin, Maxi, Padmum, Shackman and The Old Fossil. Do drop in on their blogs and see what their take is on this week’s topic. Since some of them may post late, or not at all this week, do give some allowance for that too!

My Blog II.

Looney had this to say in his comments on my post “My Blog”.

“After that technologically sounding post, I would hope you could follow up with a thorough statistical analysis of the traffic sources.”

I will eventually get around to doing that in detail, but since I want to post a test post, here is a snap shot of some statistics for two days. Please click on the image for a larger resolution.

My Blog.

I had some problems with my blog recently and my readers have all conveyed the problems faced by them one way or the other to me either through comments or through email separately.

I just wish to share what happened with all my readers so that if any of them has a similar problem, s/he can follow what I did.

We were first on Hostgator – and the Database (and site) went down (was taken down by them) as it could not handle the amount of traffic coming in.

To quote them:
“This message is to advise you of a temporary block placed on your database. The database associated with the script in “/home/rummuser/public_html” was found to be consuming an inordinate amount of processor time, to the point of degrading overall system performance. While we do limit each account to no more than 25% of a system’s CPU in our terms of service, we do not actively disable accounts until they greatly exceed that number, which is what happened in this case.

Resolving this situation may be as simple as adding additional indexes to your database, optimizing the queries used, or something equally easy. If not, it may simply be a matter of moving this database to dedicated services, as it may have outgrown a shared environment.

If you believe you have a solution to this overuse, we are happy to discuss the situation with you and possibly reinstate the database on the server. Otherwise, we will be happy to assist you with the upgrade process if a dedicated server is the most appropriate solution. Thank you, and we look forward to hearing from you shortly.
Full details in the attached text file.”

Also along the way Ranjan disabled and deleted JetPack as one of the potential problem areas.

So we consulted with our tech support and they said Hostgator is not good for high traffic sites. So I moved the site to a VPS hosting company – DigitalOcean and set up a VPS hosting package @ 60$ per year.

After this first the site was not visible because there was a conflict between the global propagation of the A name. Then I tried putting in NS entries (the DO VPS does not need NS entries, merely an A record)

Finally, knocked off the NS entries and only kept the A record.

We kept having issues with the worldwide propagation. Our tech support people in Pune could see the site, while we could not at home. Then Ranjan could see the site on his mobile while I could not in my mobile phone or my computer. I concluded that our Broadband provider has delayed Cache Flushing.

Everything eventually got resolved and now the blog seems to be functioning quite well.

The problem in a nutshell was that my old host could not handle the traffic that my blog was generating. We found a simple solution thanks to our tech-support here who are Ranjan’s partners. And I have come away from the whole exercise with a great sense of gratitude for my readers who essentially created so much traffic that I had to undergo this trauma.

I hope that this will be of some use to my readers.