Last Thursday, the (in)famous SparkFun held a rather strange event: “Free Day“. Their goal was to give away $100,000 worth of free items (at $100 max per household) in order to celebrate the move to bigger site hosting. What a cute idea! I mean, all you need to do is be one of the first (roughly) 1000 customers and you only have to pay shipping!
I more or less expected the following to happen: thousands of users would try putting their order through and the whole thing would be over in a matter of minutes. I imagined that I’d be too slow to get to order something, but I decided to try anyways. Sure, there would be some site slowdown, but I didn’t expect everything to CRASH AND BURN.
Sadly, the site did crash and burn, several times, in fact. Most of the time, I couldn’t even open an SSL connection. After about an hour of trying I managed to get to the last page where there was a big button that said “Submit your Order for Free Day” but when I pressed it, I lost the SSL connection or got a blank page. So, after another 44 minutes of trying, all $100k was given away and I ended up with nothing. Apparently, the rumor that I had heard about SparkFun moving to a server cluster (which would have been able to expand to serve the load as needed) was entirely wrong. They were trying to do this on like three servers.
At any rate, I was a little sad that I didn’t get anything, but I never expected to in the first place.
Well, by now, you’ve probably figured out what happened, so you could probably scroll down to the pictures now. I saw my name on my dorm’s package list and I assumed that my flashlight from DealExtreme had arrived, but when the worker picked up a huge box from the floor, I was a little confused.
Okay, now time for pictures. I ordered a digital soldering station.
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