I read Manga, pretty much like every comic book nerd from the 1980s. I got hooked on some fairly grown up stuff as a tween, and today I read the stuff with entertaining and semi realistic stories. One of them I read is called “Space Brothers” about, get this, two brothers who decide to become astronauts. When the story starts, the younger brother, Nanba Hibito, is poised to make his first trip to the moon, while the older brother, Nanba Mutta, is fired for head-butting his boss. As the story goes on, Mutta overcomes obstacles and is accepted into JAXA, Japan’s version of NASA.
It’s during his first lecture as a newbie wanna-be astronaut that the lead of the support staff draws the Japanese character of Person on the white board:
And he tells them a famous person said this:
The character of person shows that people are living by supporting each other.
I was unable to verify the quote, but it sounds somewhat reasonable to me. Still, in looking at it, I thought that the stroke on the right seemed to be supporting a bit more than the one on the left. So did the character in the manga, who went on to explain that some people support more than others, but they do so with the intent of boosting the others higher. That’s why the leftmost stroke is taller.
Now, Japanese has three written languages: hiragana, katakana, and kanji. For those unfamiliar, you can read a brief explanation from Ancient Scripts, but the person character I used above is from kanji. There’s a historical basis in kanji that look like their meanings, so this interpretation isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
When I look at WordPress, I see that leftmost character as being the path taken by the people who manage to write amazing code. And I see myself as the rightmost character, who tests and debugs and supports them. I feed information into them as I find it, I help others to do the same and solve their problems. I am, indeed, a support guru.
There’s nothing wrong with this. If it wasn’t for me, and people like me, WordPress would fall over. I said this at WordCamp SF in 2012: If there weren’t users, there would be no WordPress. All of us, the users and the support people and the random one-plugin developer and that person who edited a theme once, we’re all the reason WordPress is still being used as well as it is. The app was made useful and deemed useful.
But consider the modern version of the character.
This may seem strange if you’ve never read about kanji before (I was once deeply into a manga about caligraphy), but it has it’s own version of print and cursive. Here are all the various ways one might write ‘person’ in kanji:
Now you may notice that’s a Chines Kanji exemplar. It’s the same thing for around 70% of the characters. And in this case, it happens to be the same.
If I was to extend my previous thought, that the support arm of WordPress helps it reach new heights, I would look at the modern character and say that the two arms keep each other from falling over and, only when combined, can they reach the future of marvelousness.
That’s a bit cheesy, I know, but the point is that we’re not alone. We don’t work on open source in a vacuum, we work together, relying on each other, to make everything better for everyone. We’re equal partners in the work of creation, even if we don’t see it as such all the time.
I don’t know what the kanji is for Open Source, or if there even is one, but I hope it represents people for being the crux of it all, always helping people.
I will note: If this process freaks you out, remember to never make changes like this without a backup. If it’s still super spooky, you may not be ready for Multisite yet. I would consider this to be a good litmus test, though, for a wanna-be-multisite-master. You’re going to need to be able to do these things to get there.
What’s an elf to do? Well… what about Apache 2.4? After all, it’s the latest and greatest. This is when my eyebrows jumped. There’s no support for Apache 2.4. And the mod release is only on SPDY 2 when the release is on SPDY 3.1? What on earth is Google doing!? Apparently 
What did I notice? Memory and load stayed the same. And you’d think that meant this was for nothing. I should mention this happened to be on the same day I got nailed by a 60% bump in traffic on my busiest site. So … that would be better then.
Starting New Threads Dos and Don’ts
Therein lies the bane of most development setups. We don’t know what questions to ask much of the time, because we can’t know. We ask everything we can think up, and suffer from the 
There are a lot of smart, complex, questions. You know the ones where it’s “How do I thread my new sewing machine?” Sounds relatively simple and easy, but it’s deceptive. I say this having had to read poor documentation, from 1920, on how you thread a sewing machine. I realized I was smart, but I was inexperienced, so I googled how to thread that specific machine. It was a smart question, but it wasn’t simple. In fact, it was insanely complex, and at a certain point someone in the house wailed “I just want to sew!”