While most of the rest of the county focuses on the vote counts tonight, I’m up late with a few fel­low crew-​members mak­ing sure that the web­site runs smoothly and doesn’t crash. Look­ing at the same page but see­ing dif­fer­ent sto­ries. Really, I’m the least crit­i­cal night-​owl, I just have to make con­tent updates if requested. The devel­oper and net­work engi­neer are the real impor­tant ones. The site was really get­ting pounded at 7:30 when I posted the View Results block on the BOE home page, even on our load-​balanced blades, but one of the engi­neers turned on the sec­ond core on each server and page load-​time decreased by 2000%.

The web group did exten­sive test­ing, grab­bing only the tables and rows from the data­base that we needed, opti­mized the index­ing of the data and cached it in such a way that the servers wouldn’t get too steamed. Time Warner finally got around to giv­ing us our fat band­width too; with­out all of that every­thing prob­a­bly would have been crushed by about 7:45, since we’re toss­ing out much more than we used to.

Vot­ing this morn­ing went fine; I’ve voted punch bal­lots, opti­cal scan, and elec­tronic vot­ing now, and have never had a prob­lem. It did seem that the opti­cal scan pro­ce­dures were a bit need­lessly com­pli­cated; weird card­board sleeves, con­tra­dic­tory tabs and bal­lot boxes, var­i­ous checks and double-​checks and “take this lit­tle card to that per­son who will give you another card to take to that per­son” Brazi­lesque red-​tape, but I sup­pose that’s the inevitable bureau­cratic response to the kind of crap­tac­u­lar high-​profile elec­tion dis­as­ter­ba­cles that have been hap­pen­ing around the coun­try for the last decade.

It’ll never hap­pen, but I think fed­eral elec­tion days should be national hol­i­days to encour­age more folks with 9-​5s to par­tic­i­pate as poll work­ers. It’d sure take a load off of the ancient among us, even if the only addi­tional peo­ple avail­able would be those in bank­ing, gov­ern­ment and education.

Awe­some, I just got the go-​ahead to catch some shut-​eye. Since I’m at home and con­nected to work via VPN that’s good news. Now I just have to hope for no 3am phone calls.