The Eye of Kris

At 5 AM this morning, Mary and Owen left with Kristy and Clay to drive up to Michigan for a couple of days. The main purpose of the trip is to return their dad's van, which Tim and Kristy have been using during their stay (they're driving two vehicles up there, and will all come back in Mary's car on Monday). But, they're also taking the opportunity to visit some relatives and old friends, and show off their cute kids.

So, that means I'm home alone once again. I've got pleanty to do while they are gone. Today my main goal will be to prepare my Sunday School lesson for tomorrow, but I have a lot of other things that I can do to take advantage of the quiet house. I think I will try to fit in a good, long bike ride tomorrow afternoon, because the weather looks like it will be perfect for that.

This week was pretty much a blur. We had some sort of activity or gathering going on every night. Monday was a visit from the Allisons. Tuesday we went up to Bobby & Becky's for dinner. Wednesday was church and dinner afterwards with some of the youth staff. Thursday we had a bunch of people over to our house to visit with Tim & Kristy. Friday (last night) was "outdoor movie night" at the Fadelys' house again. This time, we watched "National Treasure", which was pretty good.

Wednesday, during the day, I was making a presentation for the Mid-South Business Objects User Group meeting. It went well - better than I expected after the limited preparations I did. The subject was load testing. I know you're really curious about what that is, so I'll tell you.

Load testing involves using some kind of software or system (we use Mercury LoadRunner) to create "virtual users" that run through a script to excercise a software program. The idea is to generate the equivalent of some large number of people using your system, so that you can see how it performs under a "load". Some software bugs or stability issues will not show up when only two or three people are using a system. A program may run fine for 5 or 10 users, but totally crash once you hit 25 or 50 users. Using a load testing product, we can generate hundreds of users working at the same time and find those problems before real people have to encounter them. Cool, eh?

On Thursday, I took the day off to spend some time with Tim & Kristy and we all went to the zoo in the afternoon. It probably seems like we go to the zoo all the time, but since we have memberships it's essentially free, and it's nice to be able to take people who haven't been there before. You also get to see things a little differently each time you go - for instance, this particular trip the tigers were really riled up about something, and they were getting right up to the edge of their exhibit where you can see them really well. Usually, they stay back along the rear of the exhibit or hide in the bushes. The elephants were out doing some excercises - moving big logs around and things like that. We hoped they would get in the water since it was pretty hot out, but they didn't.