Author: Dave

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breakfast for dinner


Monday and my hands ache, both sore and bruised from gripping and using tools to move around dirt and rocks over the weekend. At work, each word I typed out gave a little satisfactory burn in those underused muscles, and made me want to be back tinkering with my project instead of sitting at a desk doing e-mail. Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t get paid to fiddle in the garden – I do get paid to sit on my butt and do e-mail – and I’m gonna go where da money at. Now, if I could solve my money issue by, say, getting a lot of it or simply removing the need for it – I’d be all over a career in gardening and garage organizing and baby playing-with and mowing and and and…

Turns out I was kinda half-right about dodging my upcoming trip to Shanghai and Taiwan. Looks like the trip has turned into a shortened version, seeing me in Shanghai only (which I much prefer), and for only about four days. For some reason, I’m able to stomach this abbreviated version of the trip much better than I was able to in its previous incarnation. Actually, with the added stress of the between-travel taken away, I’m now sort of even looking forward to it. A few days in Shanghai, get some work done, go out in the evenings with friends, some good Sichuan food… yeah, I’m kinda looking forward to it after all. I’m even thinking about spending a little money and getting a custom suit made – my only suit is the one I bought to interview for jobs with out of college, and, while it still more-or-less fits, its service is about over. Plus, tailored suits there are less expensive than “stock” ones here, and the fabric is good quality if you go to the right place. We’ll see.

Tonight Sharaun made breakfast for dinner. Normally, I don’t like that, some sort of breaking-tradition thing or something – plus I really don’t like meals that feature “sweet,” I’m a “savory” kinda guy. But tonight it was welcomed. I used it as some sort of mental “reset” ritual, trying to pretend it was the real beginning to my day in hopes it might help me erase the banality that was my real day. It worked, to an extent, I had good post-breakfast “day” playing with Keaton and listening to music. It was raining outside, so I didn’t get to play in the garden (I still need to route the drip). Some days, breakfast for dinner is totally cool.

I updated Keaton’s pictures today, you can check them out here.

Bye.

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green thumb


Alone on a Saturday night, nursing a headache again – but this time I think it’s from spending most of the afternoon in the sun. I worked outside today, and it was an excellent break for me. Got me digging and sweating and realizing how out of shape I am. I was putting together a little planter box to grow veggies in, something I’ve wanted to try for a long time. I have a notoriously not-green thumb, most things I plant seem to wither or just never take root – so I did quite a bit of research before starting out. A few of our friends have had some success with raised-bed type vegetable gardens, so I decided to go down that route.

After a few hours surfing gardening sites, message boards, and newgroups – I decided I would ally my garden wholly with Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening” method. I followed the instructions to a tee, down to the exact soil mix and suggested crop layouts. It’s gonna be tight in my little 3’x10′ spot, and packing it in like SFG recommends goes against my instincts just a little, but what have I got to lose? Anyway, taking care of veggies should give me something neato to do outside on summer evenings after work, so I’m looking forward to it.

For the curious, here’s a picture of what my planter turned out like (click for larger version):

And, for the even more curious, here’s a snapshot of my tentative close-quarters crop layout, which I pretty much bit off another SFGer on the forums.

I’m supposed to leave for Shanghai this Friday, but haven’t yet bought my ticket. Monday looks booked, not sure I’ll be able to make the time. Can you tell I’m stalling in hopes of having to push-out my trip? I just don’t want to go, and to be perfectly honest, while there’s certainly plenty of work I can do there, there’s no real need for me to go that particular week. I’m not sure I’ll be able to put it off, I’ve already applied for a rush visa and sent off my passport, and my boss kinda expects me to go. I’m usually pretty good about getting these “feelings” though, and this time I just feel like, come this Friday, I may not be going anywhere.

Man I love the image that I chose for this post, I’d hang that thing on my wall… it’s that awesome.

Goodnight.

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a short break


Where have I been? Hung up; dragging; consumed and wrung-out. Work has been… taxing… this week. Not-work has been… taxing… this week. Plus, I’ve been wracked with terrible sinus headaches the likes of which I’ve never had before. They creep into my head just above my left eye and wait for my lingering cough to make them sharp and pointed. Each time my throat tickles and I cough, my head explodes in a little bloom of hurt right above that eye. I think this has something to do with stress, and maybe even the super antibiotic I’ve been taking to rid myself of my sinus and ear infections – but it’s been every day so far this week around 2pm. Today, coupled with an extraordinarily awful day at work, I came home and wanted to do nothing but collapse on the couch.

I hate this week, I really, really hate this week. More than anything I just want to take some time off, a long weekend, a vacation to clear my head and get away from everything that I hate so much right now. Even as I write my head is exploding inside and telling me just to go to bed. When I wake up in the morning I want nothing more than to roll over again and sleep, or lazily spend my day on the floor throwing balls to Keaton. I’m frustrated. I’m tired. I’m ornery and I’m fed-up. I’m also just a little emotionally oversubscribed and spent, it’s been a bad couple weeks for for tragedy and drama and I’ve been performing sick. I could use a weekend in the hills, sipping a dust-covered beer in my ridiculous “camping hat.” Could use a night in a sleeping bag under the stars, a blowjob in a tent, a breakfast burrito cooked on a Coleman stove. My attitude is bad, my outlook for the remaining two days of this week is bleak, and my head hurts.

Work sucks. Next time you see two bearded guys hawking sloppy-looking tortillas on the roadside, pull over and give those guys some cash – I’m sure they sacrificed good jobs for those corn-stained hands and hobo-lookin’ chin curtains – but don’t they look as happy as pigs in shit? Yeah, in my head they sure do.

Goodnight.

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weekend writing


Sunday night. On Friday, I went to the doctor at 11am and came home for the rest of the day, loosely monitoring e-mail while I rested on the couch. The doc’s word: an ear-infection for each ear, and a sinus infection to boot. The last time I was in in late January, they’d given me a standard course of amoxicillin to knock it out. This time, she said, she’d give me something that packed a little more wallop. Seems to be working, although I did expressly disobey the “make sure and stay well hydrated” orders in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, and it really did set me back. Hopefully though, my health will continue its drug-assisted upward trend. Well, before we go on then, here’s a link to an updated Keaton’s gallery – with some long-overdue moving pictures as well as the standard static stuff. Enjoy.

Keaton, being only a little more than a year old, has probably heard a wider variety of music than most average twenty year-olds. I love this. Today, I played with her on the carpet for hours while the iPod shuffled up tunes fro its well-stocked hard drive. “This is Emitt Rhodes,” I’d say to her, “He sounds a lot like McCartney, before McCartney went soft.” “Gah…” she’d affirm. “Now, this is Taj Mahal, and this song should always make you feel good inside, even tho they call it ‘the blues,’ OK?” “Bah,” she replies. Between her mom’s hip-hop and R&B leanings and my own rock-founded eclectic tastes – by the time she’s in high school she should be a walking encyclopedia of music history. She’ll be able to pick apart the latest flavor-of-the-week in seconds: “These guys are just ripping off Zeppelin riffs with Clash-style bass and saccharine harmonies like wanna-be Zombies.” Oh man, if she ever really says anything like that… I might faint of pride. Anyway, I do revel in the fact that she’s already heard so much, and truly do wonder if anything is getting soaked-up: the beats, the sound, the rhythms, anything… guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

Having been sole-parent to Keaton now for the better part of each past Saturday, I have a better understanding of the difficulty Sharaun must face every day. When Keaton’s awake (anytime that’s not about 1pm to about 4pm), you are wholly absorbed caring for and playing with her, and in your mind you think about all the “real” things you’ll be able to get done once she’s down for her nap. The things you want to do, like pick up the living room or put away the laundry or finish the dishes – the things you can’t get done when she’s awake. But, come that blessed time, the afternoon nap, you just want to stop more than anything. Stop everything and do nothing. Motivation to do more work is hard to come by when the moment of solace you’ve been watching minutes for finally arrives. I suppose it’s a whole new mindset, as work-schedule adjustment is all – but I can see, in my brief coverage as mom, that it’d sure take me a while to find the cadence. Maybe that’s why I come home to the house messier than when I left it each day…

You know, despite, about 90% of the time, loving this beard-thing I’m cultivating on my face – I’m still extremely self-conscious about it. I like it; I like most everything about it – but I’m just not sure it looks right. Sometimes, rare times, but sometimes, I’ll catch myself in the mirror and the thing looks horribly out of place. Other times, I’ll catch a glimpse and think about how much I like it. And, as much as I want to continue to grow it out, I have this little voice in my that’s coming up with nonchalant comebacks to the Amish jokes, to the rabbi jokes. I dunno, I read online that guys who experimenting with beards should wear them for at least six months to really get an idea if they like themselves in them. I think that would put me sometime in August, maybe I’ll use Sharaun’s birthday as a decision point. I’ve also thought about going to a “real” barber (not Fantastic Sams or Great Clips, but that place near downtown with a real barber’s pole and the guy who sits outside smoking his pipe when he’s not cutting hair) and asking them to give me a pro-style trim and “line adjustment.” I would think a “real” barber might be able to give me some tips on shape and whatnot. See the things I labor over?

Goodnight.

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wha happen?


So, pharaohweb.com went dark for a day – offline, account suspended by my host for “abuse.” What happened, you ask? I’ll tell you.

For months now, I’ve been frustrated with the spotty MySQL performance I get with my hosting package. Sometimes it slows to a crawl, sometimes it shuts down my connections to the databases throwing a “max queries exceeded” error, leaving my database-reliant pages dead in the water until the ban resets. I’ve sent numerous mails to my host’s technical support about these recurring issues, and things always seem to return to normal before too long. Recently, however, my databases were down again after nearly a 24hr period of extreme slowness and delayed reaction. So, I sent the following mail to technical support on March 8th:

Hi there,

The databases on my site have been down (not working) a lot over the past three days, and when they are up and running they seem very slow and unresponsive. Can you help explain what the issue is? I’m pretty sure I’m not overusing the max connections, but the performance is bad and the fact that I can’t get to any of my database-reliant pages is unacceptable. I chatted w/an online rep, and they advised I mail support.

Hope to hear from you soon. Thanks.

I got no reply for days.

Then, on the morning of the 13th, a friend IM’d me to say that, while trying to leave a comment on my blog, the site slowed to a crawl and began tossing “zero size reply” errors (timeouts). I pulled up the site to check, and sure enough I also got a timeout error. I immediately intiated an online chat with the technical support from the hosting company, and decided to check for a reply to my original issue while waiting in the queue for an online agent. Turns out, there was a reply to my original issue above, which had come in around 11am that morning (the exact time my buddy IM’d me to tell me the site was dying):

Dear Client

Thank you for contacting technical support.

The mysql server was running slow as a few users on the server were using more than their fair share of database resources. The issue has been resolved and the database should now be accessible. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.

Thank You.

Hmmm… that’s interesting. But, I’m sure glad they got those nasty bandwidth hogs taken care of.

In the meantime, I have to leave for lunch, so I put on my bluetooth headset and dial up technical support, leaving the still-waiting online chat to rot. Fifteen minutes later I’m at home, still on hold. I decide to check my gmail again, and lo and behold I have an e-mail from abuse@myhost.com a subject of “Account Suspended for pharaohweb.com,” it reads:

This email is regarding your account for the domain pharaohweb.com. The account was temporarily suspended because of a violation.

The service team understands the impact that a suspension can have and does not take it lightly. For a suspension to occur there has to be a clear indication of intentional abuse or a direct and immediate threat to the overall performance, stability, or security of the host server.

The following reason has been given for the suspension: Your account has been suspended for causing a high load to the mysql server which caused many customers to be unable to access their websites. Please contact abuse@myhost.com for information on reinstating the account.

The service department can inform you of what needs to be done to unsuspend the account.

Guess who the nasty bandwidth hog was? Uh-huh, it was me. Guess who was one of the “many customers” who were “unable to access their websites?” Uh-huh, also me. As I’m reading the mail, I’m finally connected to a technical support rep. I give him the rundown, and he says he can’t help, that the only way to deal with a suspended account is via e-mail to the abuse department. Grand. What’s worse, the abuse department can take anywhere from 24-48hrs to respond. Basically, I’m out of luck for up to 48hrs. Even worse, my site wasn’t simply taken offline, my account was de-activated. I couldn’t FTP, couldn’t login to my control panel, couldn’t access any of my data. Nothing to do but sit and wait.

Turns out they graciously turned my account back on about 24hrs later, with a warning that I had been banned for excessive traffic and a snippet of the MySQL logs showing an inordinate amount of activity from a WordPress plugin called BAStats. They advised me to review my code to ensure such activity wouldn’t happen again. I addressed this in part by disabling the BAStats plugin (which looked to be the major offender), and also by making the database user a random choice between of the five users I have defined for the WordPress database. By randomly choosing which user accesses the database, I hope to cut down on the too-many-connections-per-user issue. So, here’s hoping things around here will be a little faster for the trouble, and that I won’t get banned again for being so awesomely popular.

Anyway, nerd-stuff over… and aren’t you glad I’m back on the air?

Stumbled on a website called IUsedToBelieve.com today, where people post things they once took for truth when they were kids. I got a kick reading some of these things, and really enjoyed the “most common” beliefs feature, as I, too, thought some of the things on that page were reality. For instance, the childhood belief that factories make clouds – I was all over that one. Some other good ones I read included these:

I used to think that vanilla was the absence of chocolate, not its own flavor.

As a child I was totally floored by the fact that my dad owned a monkey wrench. We had never had any monkeys that needed to be taken apart and I could never figure out which part of a monkey it would fit on even if we had.

I wanted to grow up and become a marine biologist, which seemed to me the perfect combination of studying nature and shooting people.

And, although I searched and searched, I couldn’t find a single sole on the site willing to admit that they had the same childhood understanding/belief about dying as me: I used to believe that I had actually probably died several times, but that “Heaven” was just an extension of your current life. I.e., you really do “die” in your old life, but you pick up seamlessly in your new life and every single aspect is the same. It’s a sort of parallel universe thing. I used to imagine that the the people in my old life (where I was now dead and gone) were grieving me terribly. I figured I had likely died many times, and began thinking about mundane things like a spill on my bicycle or a near-accident when riding with dad as times when I’d died in my old life, and began a new one. This didn’t bother me, as I figured everyone and everything in my new life was an exact copy of things in my old life – so I wasn’t “losing” anything by dying. I just felt sad for the people in my old life who had to deal with me dying.

Goodnight.

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sweat, death, & fervor


Tuesday night and I had a great time finishing up yesterday’s mowing. It was the backyard this time, and I purposely kept finding little things to do to stay out in the weather and sweat a little longer. It was so perfect, warm and green and the iPod was on-point, I enjoyed stooping and kneeling and the sheen of sweat on my face. The drip, drip, drip of sweat off the long tangle of my beard made me even more happy. I mowed, edged, pulled weeds, sprayed weeds, fertilized, and fixed four sprinklers – it was a banner day for yardwork. In conclusion, I’d like to thank Congress for pulling-in daylight savings time and making all this after-work earth-time possible. I love 8pm sunsets.

I’ve written before about how I have a slight obsession with “true crime” stories. No, not like the cheap novels or anything, more like those “forensic” shows, and anything to do with serial killers. In fact, it’s a small theme on this site, bucketed under the “darkside” tag moniker. To me, serial killers are somewhat fascinating – not because they are awesome, but because it often boggles me to try and wrap my mind around what they do. Don’t worry, I’m not thinking about serial killing anyone.

Anyway, I’ve always been interested in the history around the Zodiac killer, especially since finding an obsessively detailed website based on the still-anonymous killer and his crimes a few years ago. It was with zeal, then, that I read the recent news that, with everything being stirred up again because of the new Zodiac movie, police in San Francisco had “discovered” a lost card from 1990 that may, in fact, be from the Zodiac killer. Well, of course the zodiackiller.com guy posted the high-res scans today, and the message boards are lighting-up with couch-based detectives trying to puzzle out meaning from the cryptic missive. Interesting, and will be fun to watch develop. Wouldn’t it be cool if, by getting his wish and making it big in public eye, he ends up hanging himself?

Today, in the middle of a meeting we were both in at work, Pat IM’d me this link. For those of you who managed to resist the urge to click the aforelinked link, I’ll pass along the title here before I go on to make my point – the article is called: The Great Rock Hope, Arcade Fire grabs the baton from Bruce Springsteen and U2, and it begins with the auspicious sentence, “For those who haven’t been following along, rock critics have crowned a new World’s Greatest Band.”

Well damn, if that ain’t coming right out and saying it.

Should Slate be afraid? Afraid to call the Arcade Fire the new “world’s greatest band?” I mean, that’s pretty presumptuous, right? So many people are thinking it, though, I guarantee. The band, having blown away the music press with their debut, have come-correct again this year with an incredibly solid sophomore effort (and now, for your benefit, I won’t keep summing up things which are much better written in the Slate article). I do have to say, however, that I feel entirely vindicated in comparing the ‘Fire to the same bands Slate does in my many lusty rants about their awesomeness.

The Slate article goes on to say that the Arcade Fire are “…a gale-force live band,” and damn if I can’t do anything but nod my head in agreement after seeing them only once prior in a tiiiiny little club in San Francisco. In fact, hoping for a repeat of that history, I recently spearheaded an e-mail campaign to try and recruit some friends to go see the ‘Fire live when they’re out this way later this summer, and my mail went something like this:

Folks,

Tickets for the Arcade Fire’s two shows in Berkley (at the Greek Theater) go on sale this Sunday via Ticketmaster, but tomorrow through some backdoor pre-sale website. Either way, I’m buying some – and hope to get them during tomorrow’s pre-sale. There are two shows, June 1st and 2nd, which is a Friday and Saturday. I’m leaning towards the June 2 Saturday show, as the post-work Friday afternoon drive to Berkley sounds like crap. Tickets are $31.50ea (plus some fees I bet), and the entire venue is general admission.

Reply and lemme know if you’re interested, and how many tickets I should get if you are down.

Even if you don’t know the ‘Fire’s work, the show should rock (plus you can tell your kids you saw them and they’ll marvel at your role as a piece of rock-‘n’-roll history). If you want to get an idea what the band is like live, check out their SNL performances last week on YouTube here.

Love you.

And hey, if the Slate (and many other) hype is to be believed… maybe my “piece of rock-‘n’-roll history” statement ain’t that far off.

Goodnight.

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anthematic?


Mowed the lawn today, and the iPod’s shuffle function was feeling anthemic. Now, when I wrote that sentence in my head as I mowed, the word “anthemic” sounded awesome. In fact, the word “anthemic” was the entire reason I wanted to write the sentence, I wanted so badly to use it – as it just sounded great in my head, and I figured it would look so sexy on the screen (sans serif, of course). How crushed do you think I was when I banged it out at the keyboard and the little red dots popped up underneath it when I hit the space bar to move onto the next word. “What, ‘anthemic’ isn’t a word?” I thought. Bollocks. A quick Google search to vindicate me – no definition quicklink in the upper right for “anthemic.” Dang, what’s going on here. Maybe it’s “anthematic?” Little red dots again. Well, that was such a bust – and I was so geared up, a shame. I’m gonna use it anyway, ’cause it makes you just want to drop your pants: anthemic. What I meant to say was, the iPod played long greats like Weezer’s “Only In Dreams,” and Death Cab for Cutie’s “Transatlanticism.” I mowed with a grin; the weather was perfect.

I think it should be illegal to sell dishtowels that don’t actually absorb water. I hate this. Hate it with a passion. We must have twenty dishtowels at home, all of which aren’t worth their weave but for the microfiber ones. Those microfiber ones are like those super-mashed up t-shirts you get at trade shows, you know the ones that are unbelievably compressed into shapes like little rocketships or wrenches or tennis shoes (depending on the trade show, of course). Everything else is jack. Don’t be fooled, my painstaking research has proven that about 90% of dishtowels just push water around and don’t absorb a drop. If you want a towel that will actually dry your dishes, get the microfiber ones… they are the jonk.

Wow folks, a few months ago, I was busy ripping through my entire CD collection, turning them into MP3s. And, since I’m anal and I like all my audio files to be tagged correctly (i.e. contain the right artist, album, track, etc. data embedded into the file), I oft-lamented on the difficulty of getting my treasured Beatles bootlegs (or bootlegs in general, for that matter) to properly tag-up. The lack of a centralized CDDB-style database for bootlegs was the main problem. Back then, I decided to do something about it and I wrote a script for the great freeware tagging app, the Godfather, that would go out and “scrape” the then-incomparable bootlegzone.com website for tag data. The script was complex, full-featured, and worked like a charm. With its help, I automatically tagged up hundreds of Beatlegs… all with the press of a button. That whole time, I kept thinking, “What if bootlegzone went offline tomorrow?” Me, with hundreds of untagged bootlegs still to go and so much invested in my script… I’d’ve been heartbroken. Well, fate, this time, it seems, spared me. As of sometime late last month, bootlegzone went dark for good. Sad to see it go, but glad I got to exploit its labors before it died. Believe me though, in the Beatleg world, it’s a big deal.

In Keaton news, she’s begun to stand unassisted at every chance she gets. Sharaun or I will say, “No hands!” and she’ll throw her hands in the air and squeal like she’s riding an imaginary roller coaster. So far, she seems more interested in perfecting her standing technique than she does taking any real steps – but we have been able to get her to take a single step by moving away from her and holding her hand. She can push into a standing position from sitting, so I’m assuming walking isn’t far off. Things move fast. Speaking of Keaton, I managed to get up a new series of images to her gallery – check ’em out here.

Thanks.