When I visited the ophthalmologist a few days ago, he strongly suggested I get new glasses because my prescription had changed more than 0.25 diopters in both eyes. I thought about going to Costco in the hopes it would save me some money, and I might have done that in a normal year – but this year, staying out of Costco is high on my priority list. I’ve gotten glasses online with fair success – but I’ve only been willing to do that for special-purpose glasses for golf or sitting at the computer. So this afternoon, I returned to the ophthalmologist to visit the optician there.

I was still interested in saving money, so I brought my current backup glasses to see if the frame could be reused. I never found the answer to that question – the optician explained that I could get a brand new frame for no co-pay with my VSP benefits; I ordered the new frame. The old frame (and lenses) will go to the Lions’ Club so someone will be able to use them – just not me.

Both Diane and I decided we like our new Macs, so we sent our old ones back to Apple for trade-in. For the first time in more than a decade, we don’t have any “Pro” Macs in the house – but we do have two Airs and two Minis.

This blog runs on a Linux server on Linode (referral link). I use the server for a few other purposes, too; one of its tasks is to send us selected items from the paper every morning. It usually runs smoothly, but this morning, we didn’t get the email from the server, nor any error messages. I logged onto the server and ran the summary program at the console; it seemed to work but at the very end, I got a message: “Killed”.

I knew I hadn’t written any such message into my program, so I started digging. I didn’t have to dig far – as soon as I looked at the system log, I saw messages from the “oom-killer” program, followed by a message: “Out of memory: Killed process”¦”.

I ran top and found that my memory was almost all in use, as was my swapfile. I rebooted, and things seemed better – but I did some more web searching and found out how to check the size of the swapfile – it was only 256MB on a 1GB image, far less than recommended.

I stopped the machine and reallocated space to give me a 2GB swapfile; I hope that solves the problem. As of this minute, the system is using 416MB of the swapfile, but there’s also nearly 400MB free main memory – I hope it knows what it’s doing, because I don’t!