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Thanks to everyone for their well wishes last week -- no ear ache today, no fever, only a slight bit of insomnia!

Lots going on in development, but most of it is on stuff that we can't announce yet, so let me touch on a couple of random topics.

Offtopic
Interesting, totally tangential thing that I read: Many studies have been done on optimism and its influence on your life. It turns out that optimists are happier (which makes sense, I guess; they don't have the stress of imagining the worst!), but in addition, the optimists are more successful, despite the fact that they are slightly worse at accurately evaluating a situation as pessimists. So what seems to be the underlying component? Quite simply, even though an optimist is a little less likely than a pessimist to evaluate a situation correctly, the optimist tries harder -- and by that virtue alone actually ends up more successful.

I won't attempt to generalize this to a Law of the Universe, but nonetheless I wonder if an important step in self-awareness is to understand how many of the things stopping you are actual barriers vs. your own inner psyche just trying to convince you that you can't succeed.

Database Problems Today
There were a bunch of database problems last night and today, and oddly enough they didn't seem to be related to the event.

A note of explanation: we have some 30-odd database clusters, with each cluster having a number of individual machines. (Having multiple machines in each cluster gives us redundancy against inevitable machine failure; when machine starts to act up, we just swap it out and designate another one to be the master). We move features around from cluster to cluster to balance the load, so you'll often find totally unrelated features on the same database server(s).

What we started seeing Thursday night was queries on one of the clusters stacking up -- basically, there was a queue of computers waiting for the response from the database server. In the process of trying to figure out what was going on, we first turned off arenas, and then further played around until we figured out that it was the marketplace.

Today was more of the same: getting problems with the database and trying to figure out the queries that were killing it. At this point everything seems to be okay, your data is safe, and all the database servers are running tip-top.

This was not a cheap trick to try and raise donations to the stores, or anything like that.

Stores Mini-Event
Isn't this the coolest event ever? Great job by our art team + edy + fieryange1, and I find the whole thing very engaging and kind of cool. (And, to answer a question I saw coming up a couple places: yes, the donations actually do increase the bar length; the bar isn't just randomly increased). User reception seemed to be pretty positive, too, with most people understanding that this is a gold sink, but a small minority complaining that we were trying to scam people out of money.

New Sponsorship
I don't usually mention sponsorships, but I particularly liked this one -- it's about a book! With words, and chapters, and full sentences! And you can download the whole first volume of the series for free! So if you're interested in a free book, go here.

(Although, amusingly, a couple of us were really jazzed about this sponsorship because we thought it was for The Alchemist, but it turned out to be a different alchemist. Highly recommended book).

Home Page / Aquarium
Bunches of experimentation to try and get the aquarium to load quickly on the home page; we finally think that we've got it licked, so please try it out next week when an aquarium is featured and let us know how it works out.