Category: blogging

Where write about writing, and my website sounds familiar.

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all seasonally-displaced


Funny weather today in Northern California – all cold and cloudy and breezy, made me feel all seasonally-displaced. The ashen sky and blustery gusts made me think of Halloween, and that made me think about how I think, for the first time since being here, I’m considering not dolling up the house for the holidays. Not the end of an era, I think, more just a respite. Maybe I’ll change my mind come August, who knows. Right now, though, I’m not too hot on the idea this year.

I actually left work around noon to come “work from home” (the quotes owed to the fact that, at my sawmill, “working from home” is common parlance, so much so that it’s often acronym’d as “WFH”). I did, however, work – despite the reputation that WFH may have. I will admit though, that it was nice… sitting on my couch typing instead of in my dreary grey cubicle at work – for that, the office-disconnect is worth it.

Anyway… tonight I had some champagne, shared a couple glasses in celebration of “the hell of it.” So, champagne-buzzed and carried by the chorus-driven pop melodies of my most recent one-man-show musical discovery, BC Camplight, I’m gonna write. (But, for real, check out BC Camplight. With the excepted couple of oddball tracks, that album is goood).

Oh, and, if you’re reading this – whomever your pipe to the internet is has updated their DNS records, and you’re now viewing sounds familiar on it’s brand new shiny host. I don’t know where the new server lives, but it sure seems peppier than the old one to me. I’m surprised how quickly and efficiently I was able to migrate my content – and glad it’s up and running. With any luck, you’re now zipping around the blog viewing pages and leaving comments with ease. Let’s now move on from the timeout Hell of the past few weeks, OK? Good then.

Y’all been watching the presidential debates on CNN? Hope so. Even though it still seems early to me, there’s some good discussion happening. Nobody, on either side of the fence, looked standout-amazing to me, but I suppose the machine is still lurching into motion and there’s a lot of spit and rag left to be applied before the top few contenders shine like political polished chrome. For what it’s worth though, I am getting excited at the prospect of change – as I think lots of Americans are.

I suppose I don’t have much more to write… I’m still celebrating a working blog. Goodnight.

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sea of white


The Arcade Fire show Saturday night in Berkeley was just awesome. The bad was on-point, the sound was crisp and the mix was perfect. It was a sea of elated white people bouncing around and clapping and singing along to the Fire’s hooky hooks. I was entirely surprised that the band was able to maintain the energy levels they had when we saw them the 1st time in that little 200-person club. Sure, it’s harder to communicate that kind of energy to an audience of ~8,000 – but they had everyone on their feet by the end. Check out some video of them doing an oldie-but-goodie over here at YouTube.

I didn’t post Sunday night because I spent most of the evening working to backup all the files and databases on my server. That’s right folks, I did it: I signed up for a new hosting provider in an attempt to escape the sinking ship that is my current host. I made the call around 11pm Sunday night, mostly out of frustration, but also after sitting down and writing the following in a text file because I couldn’t access my blog. The background:

Over the past week my uptime has simply disintegrated to abysmal levels. Now, the downtime which used to be a fairly rare exception has unfortunately become the norm, and, more often than not, I can’t even get onto my own pages. Sunday night I spent a good chunk of time trying to gauge what effort would be involved in actually pulling up stakes and moving all my pages to a new host. The outlook was grim: moving all my database-reliant pages (the blog, the galleries, my personal server-stored bookmarking app) is going to be a bear, and there’s a real risk things won’t come over perfectly and will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. The whole migration process is iffy, and the prospect was almost enough to make me keep trying to get StartLogic to help me out – but I’ve just had such poor luck.

But, in the end, I the effort seemed worth it – and I bit the bullet. The switch will hopefully be transparent to you, dear reader. The only noticeable change should be the site speeding up and not crapping out all the time. I hope for things to be up and running and swapped to the new host by the end of the week. We’ll see. Just bear with us here at sounds familiar for a week or so, OK? Thanks.

Hey, wanna see some pictures of my garden? OK. From top to bottom: 1) I put up a mini-scarecrow to keep the dang birds from my strawberries, 2) It seems to be working, but one of the berry plants has aphids, 3) Flush with ripening tomatoes.

And finally, a web roundup of other pictures from our Memorial Day weekend spent camping (welcome to the digital age, folks, where everyone who you go camping with has digital cameras and websites): Bill & Susie post some pictures, and so does Megan. I particularly enjoyed the series near the bottom of of Keaton in the dog-cage while Jake pokes her with a stick.

Other than that, I don’t have much to write.

Hopefully my stupid webpage was up long enough to let me post this, and likewise let you read it. Stupid webpage.

Goodnight.

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it’s not good, but there’s new pictures


Tuesday night, fresh from a post-work trip to the bar for some beer-fueled conversation. It’s essential, you know, to “hang out” with your workplace compatriots… I’m convinced that it’s one of the single most effective things you can do to increase your stock at the old sawmill. A beer and candid conversation go miles and miles when it comes to relationship-building – the Japanese have it down.

Well, changed the blog’s layout – reduced the page area to 900px wide. I know this matters not to most folks, but, to me, it means some folks with more wimpy screen resolutions might be able to see some more green framing the center white text area – which was my intent when choosing this new layout. So, hopefully your user experience is a little greener now – just as it should be. In other blog news, I’ve been sporadically working on my upcoming half-2007 “best of” list, as has become tradition here at sounds familiar. I know you’re simply wet with anticipation, but it’s not right to publish it before sometime around mid-June… so sit tight.

Found out today that I missed out on tickets for the Smashing Pumpkins’ reunion run at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I wasn’t paying attention, honestly, and wasn’t really sure I wanted to go. Having heard the new song, however, as well as watched the internet buzz build (even PF is saying the new single is “not that bad”) – I’m now kicking myself. What’s worse, they sold out and eleven night run (well, not really a run, but close), and the Fillmore shows are on of only two “engagements” (one on the west coast, one on the east) they’re doing. That’s eleven times over the Fillmore’s capacity – and we missed out. For me, it would’ve been a pretty important concert – marking the tenth time I’d have seen the Pumpkins live (if you count the various band configs). Ten times is a lot for one band. I’m still cautiously optimistic about the album, and I don’t like that new song all that much – but it is fun to listen to. I think this comment on stereogum pretty much sums it up for me:

I must admit, the chubby, depressed high schooler still somewhere in my subconscious is pretty stoked from reading that setlist. And I really don’t hate that first single like…even a little bit. It’s not spectacular, but it’s certainly not terrible either. Maybe this comeback could actually be more than Billy Corgan in need of some fast cash and an ego stroke?

Yeah… dang… guess I’ll have to put Sharaun on Craigslist watch for tickets.

Been getting a lot of requests for new Keaton pictures lately, soooo… I uploaded some tonight. Hope you enjoy them!

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oversubscribed


Well, let’s get it out of the way. As you can see, I’ve given the blog a pretty massive visual overhaul. I’ve completely, entirely, 100% abandoned my old homemade theme in favor of a new-fangled widget-ready highly-customizable one. So far, I like it. I’m sure that I’ll uncover some formatting issues with certain older posts that just don’t conform to the new layout and style – but as of now I think most everything is working. Sure, I still have some small style tweaks I want to make (fonts and colors, mostly), but I was happy enough to go live as-is. If you see something busted, please let me know. Oh, and what do you think?

Let’s get this going.

Sometimes I feel like my life is slowly getting too scheduled. Not only is my eight-hour workday allocated to the minute, making me fight for thirty minutes here and there for unexpected tasks, but it seems like my evenings and weekends are beginning to look like my Outlook calendar as well. It’s not that I’m a stickler for plans or agendas or itineraries, it’s just that I end up having so many things I want to do, which all compete with everything I have to do. In some ways, I suppose this is a natural consequence of “growing up:” having friends, having kids, having a home to take care of and a career. But sometimes I wish I didn’t have to budget for downtime. I know, in reality, my life isn’t like this – it’s just been a bad couple months… with no sign of end… so… maybe my life is like this.

Too much time tweaking stylesheets… I’m out.

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getting out of a rut


Let’s clear the air here first, before we do the standard blog fare: For about two weeks now, I’ve been pretty disappointed with the blog. I haven’t been able to put the right amount of time and effort into it, and it’s shown with multiple-day dry spells and bad entries. I know exactly why too – I’ve just been doing too much of everything else: hanging out with friends, yardwork, playing with the baby, reading – just to name a few. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all, but I would like to get back into some more meaningful writing (not because I feel guilty but because I actually enjoy it). So, I’m hoping to get out of the rut here soon – maybe you’ll decide to see me through it, sit with me through the doldrums and wait for the other end of the tunnel?

Hey, before you read more – go check out the big ol’ backlog of pictures I uploaded to Keaton’s gallery, you won’t regret it (she’s cute as crap!).

Sitting at the gate awaiting my flight from Shanghai back to the US. There is a brilliantly beautiful girl sitting not far from me, traveling with her family. She looks to be part Western and part Eastern, apparently the best bits of each. I’m pretty much in love with her right now. Seems she’ll be flying to San Francisco as well, so perhaps between napping, reading, watching some TV, and stealing an occasional glance of her – I’ll have an enjoyable ten hour flight. And now, much to your amazement and sure-thing applause, I bring you the next sentence from some fifteen-hours later: Sitting in San Francisco waiting for that last puddle-jumper home. The brilliantly beautiful girl is also going home, it seems, and her home is the same as my home. Although, I must admit the long flight has dulled her edges just a bit – but I must look even worse than my fresh-and-clean best too, so I’d say the mutual chances of a clandestine hookup have at least gone down proportionally. It’s OK, though, because I’m about to be home with my wife and daughter – and I’m ready ready ready…

Ahhh… the relaxation that can only come from being on one’s own couch, a full weekend ahead of him, having just returned from China (yes, it’s a rare form of relaxation indeed). Keaton’s here too, just dad and baby – while mom man’s some event up at church (she’s become quite Mrs. Involved lately with all manner of “mom’s group” doings, which I think is wonderful – and probably appeals to that sense of responsibility she cultivated and then had to leave when she started, then departed from, her teaching job). All this means dad’s got Keaton for the morning, up until her afternoon nap. After that, I plan to try and get my garden planted (providing the clouds break). I’ll get what I can as living transplants up at the Home Depot, and if I can’t find the exact breed of what I want there I’ll do seeds over the ‘net and start that way.

Speaking of my garden, the folks in Shanghai were quite astounded when I told them that I was trying my hand at the trade. Seems their notion of American suburban backyards doesn’t include gardens (wonder why) – and my desire to “farm” had them somewhat befuddled. I liked it, added to my Western sense of mystery, I’m like a storybook figure: A rich American engineering manager with two cars who can have limitless babies if he desires and grows vegetables in his backyard. All I need is a blue ox and a loom that spins gold and I’d be a timeless legend. Now I have the added pressure of a few Chinese coworkers imagining my bounty of homegrown vegetables to deal with as I tool my crop to success though – if it’s a complete bust now I’ll be letting an entire nation down.

Anyway, Keaton and I are sitting around watching the sun try to break through the morning clouds. We’re listening to the astounding-sounding MFSL version of Yes’ calssic 1972 album Fragile, which I just put on my iPod this morning after discovering, after getting a sudden and strong yen to rock out to it during my flight home, that, much to my horror, it was not already thereon. (Man, I re-worded that sentence like four times before I decided I’d placed all the comma’d-off portions correctly. If you do that “it has to make sense without the comma’d parts rule” it should read: “…after discovering that it was not already thereon,” sounds right to me). Anyway, the omission made me realize that my Yes collection is somewhat lacking, so I ran out and picked up both 1971’s The Yes Album, and 1972’s Close to the Edge, which are both sounding mighty fine to me right now.

Oh, I’ve been wanting to write about all the things Keaton can now do – more for my own recordkeeping than bragging, although a mite of bragging ain’t never hurt no one that I heard of. Anyway, Keaton can now say the following things: “bye-bye,” “hi,” “dog,” “ball,” “hat,” “night-night,” “wow,” “mom,” “dad,” “bread,” and most recently, “no.” She can correctly point to the following body parts when asked: eyes, ear, belly, feet, nose, and tongue. As of tonight, she’s taken eight consecutive steps while standing, so on the road to walking. She can make a roaring sound when you ask, “What does a lion say?” Sharaun thinks she’s a genius because of all of this, I just think she’s regular.

Just finished my taxes. I had put in Keaton’s SSN yet because I couldn’t find the card. Found it, put it in, and saw my Fed refund go from like less than $200 to just over a grand. I thought that was hardcore awesome. 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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keaton will have an opinion


Monday morning, another blur of a workday… I like it busy, goes faster.

At nights I started this new thing: no laptop until Keaton goes to bed. You’d think this would be something I’d just do, being that I’m literally on the computer all day as my job – but it’s not. I frequently get home from work and pull my laptop, which I just put into my bag no more than ten minutes ago, out of my bag. Yes, you’d think I’d make it a point to give myself a “break.” No, I don’t. Because, you see, when I get home I have all these “home” things I want to do on the computer that, for the most part, I don’t do at work. No, no porn. Mostly I want to check a few message boards I lurk on, check what’s new in the world of music blogs, make the political and world news roundup, whatever. Like I said, I, for the most part, at least, don’t do that kinda stuff at work.

So anyway, I’ve been making it a point to leave the infernal thing in it’s el-cheapo laptop bag at least until Keaton goes down. This way, I find I’m more prone to actually enjoy those few hours I get with her each day. Usually, I see her for thirty minutes in the morning, an hour at lunch, and maybe three hours after work – and not that I need to “force” myself to pay her attention during those times, but I feel like I should do what I can to make them matter. So, no laptop until she’s down – that’s the rule.

I got my hair cut Sunday afternoon, mostly because I was long overdue but also partly because I’ll be “face-to-facing” with some customers this week and want to look somewhat presentable. As luck would have it, I ended up in the chair of the same ebullient Vietnamese immigrant whose fervent patriotism I’ve commented on before. I don’t mind the guy, actually kind of like him, and anyway he’s not why I’m writing this story. Sitting across from the infinite mes in the infinite chairs stretching deep into the infinite deep of the mirrored walls was a young girl. She was ten, in fact, I heard the Saigon Turtle ask her mom as he entered her information into the haircut-computer.

Being that she was getting her haircut on the opposite side of the room, our backs were to each other, but I could see her face by virtue of the mirrors. She was pretty, as far as ten year-old girls go I suppose, with long brown hair that the pierced-up stylist had twisted up in clips and was busy spraying down with water. Now listen perverts, I’m not saying this young girl was pretty because she was “pretty” like that, I’m saying it because, as a father of a daughter, I couldn’t help sneaking glances and thinking to myself, “Keaton is going to be that old one day.” The stylist asked the girl if she ever wore her her “this way,” and pulled a large swath of it back around her ear in the mirror. “Yeah, sometimes,” she replied. “Some day,” I thought, “Keaton will know how she ‘sometimes’ wears her hair back behind her ears.” “Some day,” I thought, “Keaton will have a little black purse with nothing important in it, just like that girl.” “Someday,” I thought, “Someday.”

Half of me can’t wait for the day when I can walk down to the park with her, maybe kick around a soccer ball or fly a kite or have a picnic. The other half of me stares into her little blue eyes before I put her down to bed and wishes silently that I’ll have just a little more time with her as she is.

Here’s a bunch of random stuff to round this thing out.

Another Arcade Fire track leaked today, still waiting for the whole thing… still waiting.

Upgraded to WordPress 2.1 today, things went smoothly and the backend improvements are nice. Just another step towards bringing you the best blog possible (step one would be to improve my writing, but I’ve somehow jumped ahead and began toiling on the minutiae instead).

Before I go, and I know this has been making the rounds lately, I just had to post the Andy Griffith vs. the Patriot Act video. Check it out below (I actually know this particular episode quite well) and see what one of my most treasured TV icons has to say about eavesdropping and the law. On a side note, who’d’ve thunk little ol’ Andy Griffith of Mayberry to be a terrorist sympathizer. He obviously hates our troops, and I find it disgusting. See for yourself:

Goodnight.