Trials and Errors

Last night was a pretty rotten night. It all started with that "backup" problem I mentioned earlier. I won't get into the technical details (I promise!), but to make a long story short, I needed to update some of the software on the server to make the backups with the new hosting provider work properly.

It didn't go well.....

I hate updating this stuff. It's not really stuff I know much about. If I still worked at Intel, I'd have someone else install it for me who knows what they're doing. =) I can generally update MY code easily enough. I know how it works, what it needs, yadda, yadda, yadda. Updating stuff like the operating system, web server, database server.... The stuff nightmares are made from. Ask Amanda. Apparently, I was even talking in my sleep about it a couple of night ago, much to her annoyance. =)

It's been a couple of years since I've had to update some of the server's software. Things still aren't completely back up and running normally. (Try going to ryansatotalgoober.com if you want proof of that.) So I'll be taking AQ down for probably several hours trying to pound out the rest of the issues this update has caused. Sorry for the inconvenience.

In completely unrelated news, while waiting for the midnight hour last night to take AQ down, I played around with some stats just to see what I could do. Check out your My Statistics page, near the bottom. (This page is for premium members only.) Near the bottom, if you have at least five finds recorded on AQ, will be displayed the total number of miles you've traveled to get all your finds.

It's not a perfect number, and there is some "fudging" involved to account for finds of mystery boxes or finds of unlisted boxes, but it should be a relatively accurate (if not precise) account for the number of miles you had to travel to get all of the boxes you've found.

Me? Well, I've traveled about 292,070 miles to nab all my finds. Amanda, the flight attendent, has pulled in over 800,000 miles of traveling. It's rather database intensive to run the numbers for every single member on Atlas Quest, but I'd say there's a better than average chance that Amanda holds the record for most miles traveled. If you have more, I'd be very curious to know it. =)

I should also point out, my list of finds isn't actually complete. I never did get around to recording the boxes I found while thru-hiking last year. The miles traveled also doesn't account for the traveling you've done to plant boxes or attend events. (Perhaps future updates!)

But it's still a fun number to look at. =)