Category: general

Where I put something when I’m too lazy to categorize it.

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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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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.

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never a good idea


Sunday afternoon and I’ve eschewed a hundred things so I can sit on the couch in the sunshine. I’m not feeling quite 100%, my sinuses really acting up – so badly that I’m thinking my sinus infection of a few weeks back may not have been completely quelled by my round of antibiotics. All through my open windows I hear the sound of a neighborhood mowing, that doppler-effect sound of each pass up and down their lawns as they make something of their Sunday time and I nothing of mine.

The multiple mowers, and high-seventies temperatures, though, make it a done-deal, summertime is on its way… slowly but surely we’ll get there again. Had a good weekend though, despite the congestion. Spent all Saturday with Keaton while Sharaun went snowboarding, it was really nice. We walked down to a local park, met up with some friends, ate fried chicken, tossed the frisbee, and played around in the grass (pictures coming soon). That evening we headed out to Ben’s birthday party, where I drank some beer and smoked some Djarums. Man those Djarums are just never a good idea.

We ate dinner with friends Sunday night, one of my favorite things we do regularly. Even with Keaton, we swap dinners with friends on average three times I week, I’d guess. Most of our friends on this rotation are the kind of friends whose places I feel completely comfortable at. The kind of friends where, if I fall asleep on their sofa and snore while taking an unplanned nap, it’d be nothing out of the ordinary. We’re lucky to have friends like that, I think… We’ve been able to cultivate a nice little network of good peoples. OK, enough of the sappy shit.

The news said the temperatures this weekend reached eighty degrees. I’m not sure about that, but I am sure that we had some amazing weather. It’s the kind of weather that makes me think about camping. In fact, this weekend would have been prime for it, if the weather up in the hills was anywhere near as warm as it was here (which I’m sure it wasn’t).

Thing is, I’m looking at needing some kind of family getaway vacation thing sometime soon here… as work has really been weighing on me the past couple weeks. Problem is, I don’t think anything is going to change in the next few weeks. Not even the prospect of making my more-than-a-year since return to China and Taiwan seems like a decent break. But I need one, oh I need one.

I hesitate to publish this, but there’s nothing else and it’s words. Goodnight.

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weekend minus one


Friday tomorrow, and we have an “off-site” event at work, which means it’s gonna be just a little more than a half day and then an afternoon of early beers and some snooker. I think it’ll be a nice way to ease into the weekend. As for the weekend, I don’t have many plans. Sharaun is leaving me with Keaton all day Saturday while she goes snowboarding. I’m thinking we’ll maybe walk to the park or something. At some point I have big plans to mow and fertilize the lawn, and maybe install a screen door.

My website was down most of the day today, some database issues on the host side which I hope they’ve now worked through. Not that I’m losing millions in trade for every minute of downtime, but I’m sure Sharaun’s grandmother in Florida thinks her computer is broken when she goes to look at Keaton’s new pictures and gets a 404. I really think that blog comment spam is what may be causing my somewhat frequent database issues, as my host limits the number of database “connects” I can have in any given time-chunk. Every time a spam comment gets written to the database (which still happens, even though Akismet catches them and relegates them to an unpublished “spam” queue for later review), it counts against my “max connections” ceiling. Honestly, that’s the only thing I can see pushing me over the limit. Also, though, I think my host has weak database support on my current plan (where I share a single server with hundreds of other users’ websites, and we’re all getting a slice of the same MySQL pipe on the backend). I could upgrade to a virtualized dedicated server – but that costs dough. Anyway, sorry for the nerd-talk.

My beard is progressing nicely and is now rather fuzzy and voluminous, little hairs jutting this way and that in a nice thick tangle. Whenever I’m in the car, I strain my neck to admire it in the rearview. I love watching the water drip off it in streams during my morning shower, and the fact that the fuzz of it obscures the bottom lobe of my ear in the mirror. I have these visions of the pictures from this summer’s future camping trips, where I have this massive jumble of beard hanging off my chops, like the mountain man I always dream about but will never be. Sometimes I wonder if, come the day I decide I want to shave it all off (never?), Keaton will recognize me the same. I know she’ll know who I am, but I can’t help but think she’s gotten used to unshaven daddy as the one true daddy – any other daddy might just be an impostor.

I’m all pumped because Sharaun and I and a bunch of friends all got tickets to see the Arcade Fire play at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley in June. There are still tickets left, so get ’em and join us there – the whole venue is general admission so it should be blissful anarchy trying to jockey for the good seats. Yay! Arcade Fire in an outdoor venue on a nice June night… I can’t wait.

Goodnight.

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lock my tear-drenched heart away inside a steel box


A hodge-podge of stuff today. I almost didn’t write, started falling asleep watching that Discovery channel “The Tomb of Jesus” documentary (not because it was boring, but because I was all alone and reclined on the couch). But, then Sharaun got back from the gym and I got up and forced myself to do the dishes and I got a second wind. So here I am then, let’s go. Oh, before we start, I updated Keaton’s gallery – check it out.

My throat is sore and raw, and I have a raspy cough. I know that it’s not sick though, it’s allergies, and it sucks. When I was a kid, I had asthma and allergies. Asthma bad enough that I remember gaspingly wheezing for air in the back seat as my parents drove me to the emergency room, and allerigies bad enough that my parents had to take me in each week to get a shot in the arm.

As I got older, both the asthma and allergies waned in strength, and by the time I was a teenager in Florida – I was pretty much allergy-free. At the time, I thought it was just the natural “growing out of it” that many allergists will advise you is probable as you age. Now, however, after my return to California, and my allergies’ return to me – I’m beginning to think it’s more likely I “geographied” out of my allergies than I did grew out of them. For now, friends, they are back with a vengeance. A mere seven years back in California and they plague me come Springtime. What do you know, another tick in the “pro” column for the good ol’ South.

Straightening the other day after bending down to retrieve a little toy monkey for Keaton, I smacked the top of my head on the underside of the little niche where our TV lives. Man it hurt. I immediately put Keaton down and grabbed my poor skull, considering, as all men do when in severe pain, what the best curses would be to communicate my feelings, and in which direction and how hard to throw the little plastic monkey that was responsible. In the end, I just groaned and squeezed the monkey tight – not wanting to go all Hulk out-of-control with Keaton watching. My head was bruised, and my teeth hurt from clacking together, but I lived. I did, however, somehow end up with a smallish pimple-like thing right where I bumped my noggin. I find this painful, disgusting, and embarrassing. Who gets a zit on the very crown of their dome? Right there where I’m my baldest, right there in plain view, dead-smack on the perihelion of my melon.

I think I need to change my strategy at work a bit, need to add a little more “dick” to how I manage. I say this because I think it’s a semi-fault of mine to be a little too friendly and kind, and I’ve found that lately those traits have been getting in the way (somewhat) of the “hardness” with which I want to communicate some things. I don’t want to be a jerk boss, no, I’d always like to be the nice boss – but I think I need to flex some muscle, bring some thunder, in order to shed that schoolboy image of someone who can’t get all iron-fisted when the need arises. Yes, I think this is something I’ll have to do. Learn to be brusque, learn to be curt, firm, and more unwavering in the face of strong emotion. What I’m saying is, I have to learn to lock my tear-drenched heart away inside a steel box when necessary. Come then, the new age of me – the dick.

Goodnight.