Category: tech

Talk about software, hardware, electronics, and a myriad of other sex-repellent topics.

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bloggin’ on the move


Happy Tuesday folks, I’m just gonna get right into it.

Blogging from among the masses in the general admission section on the lawn at the Gwen Stefani show (from my phone, no less).

The youth is in full “social gathering” regalia, young men with their baseball caps twisted sideways and half-cocked over tightly freshened-up crew-cuts, young ladies squeezed into skin-tight bits of cloth they’re trying to pass as clothes. Oh, it’s on (it’s not really “on,” I actually feel pretty old, to tell the truth).

I’m pretty much transfixed watching the chaperoning moms, the way they nonchalantly watch their pre-teen daughters “wind and grind.” I can’t tell if they’re really good at pretending not to care, all the while squirming on the inside, or if they truly don’t mind the statutory-inviting junior-stripper antics. Tell you what though, some of these girls are dancing like they have body parts that they haven’t even grown yet. Were we this bad when we were kids?

I’m actually petty amazed I’m able to blog from my phone right now; believe it or not, it’s the first time I’ve ever done it. This new BlackBerry predictive text keyboard is pretty functional, as should be evidenced by the fact that I totally wasted time typing about typing. Anyway, moving on.

Y’know, being here, seeing these kids, and, more importantly seeing these adults doing their best to look like kids, I’m actually happy to be all ‘grow’d up.” I’d hate to be “that guy:” Forty-something years old, all tatted up wearing a 13lbs silver herring-bone chain with spiked bleached-blonde hair ala “I’m thirteen and I just discovered Sid Vicious.” Hey, if I’m ever that guy, sit me down and lay it on me, OK? (The truth that is, lay the truth on me, OK?)

Well, the it’s nigh on midnight and we’re on our way home. The battery on this thing is almost gone, and I’m fresh out of things to say anyway. I know I’m totally gonna be disappointed with the length of this post when I see it on a real screen, but it looks huge squanched up on this tiny thing, so I’m calling it good.

‘Night.

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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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sated, buzzed, and sweaty


A three-day weekend spent communing with nature. Three days with dirty feet and dusty skin, greasy hair and smelly clothes; three days spent sated, buzzed, and sweaty.

I had a great time… lounging in the sun, swimming in the river, drinking around the fire, and taking a couple small hikes (4mi and 3mi, respectively) as a family. Keaton enjoyed herself too, and was a great little camper. We arrived midday Friday and broke camp bright and early Monday morning, bellies full of that camping staple – breakfast burrito ala Coleman stove. We were home by 10am, car unpacked and cooler emptied by 11. The rest of the afternoon consisted of trawling for new holiday weekend leaks (some good stuff too, the new Architecture in Helsinki, the new Polyphonic Spree, and the new Paul McCartney), and an afternoon nap. All in all I came away better for it, my only injuries being somewhat sore legs from our short hikes and some painful little nicks on my fingers from trying to open a Newcastle with a rock.

The first harvest of my first foray into gardening is nigh. This weekend, I counted a whopping fifty-nine green tomatoes (several different varieties), at least a few of which are big enough that I figure they’ll be reddening up soon. My corn stalks are all averaging about 2ft-3ft tall and look healthy, and I would’ve had a nice handful of strawberries by now had the dang birds not carried every stinking one away just before they were pickin’-ripe. Of all the things I planted, only the peppers have fared poorly. They’re growing, but they’re just slow… still tiny and seemingly stalled out as seedlings – some have been completely destroyed by some sort of pest, chewed through at the base. I’ve decided I’m going to dig up their squares and plant pre-grown peppers instead – I’m cheating.

I’m seriously considering changing webhosts, StartLogic’s performance has been on a steady decline for about a year now – and I’m wondering if they’re just overburdened and can’t keep up with the business. If I do switch, there’ll likely be a spotty transition period while the domains transfer and I attempt to setup all my major subpages again (a little worried about having to restore my blog and gallery…). Anyway, I sent this note to my current host today:

Subject: Database-reliant pages continue to be EXTREMELY slow

Hi there,

This is the 3rd time I’ve mailed about slow performance on all my database-reliant pages, but the load-times continue to get worse. Lately, I get timeout errors more often than not – making my pages nearly unusable.
Is there some concrete answer you can give me about this? At your suggestion, I’ve done many things to try and alleviate the slowdown:

  • Reviewed all my code for efficiency in database calls
  • Randomized database calls from a pool of all available users
  • Removed any high-load code

If I can’t get some increased performance, or if the answer is “upgrade to a higher-price plan,” I’ll be honest and say I’ll likely defect to a more reliable host.

Hope you can help me out – thanks.

We’ll see what happens. Sorry for the geek-talk.

I think that’s enough for tonight. I did upload a bunch of new Keaton pictures from our weekend outing – but I’ve not put them in a public gallery yet as I want to wait for some images from other cameras that were on-the-scene to get ’em all in one batch. Goodnight folks.

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gotta get that chore wheel, y’all


Well, it’s official – Keaton’s walking. All of the sudden today she just started standing up from sitting, not needing to pull up on anything for support. Once up, she’ll walk short distances – ten or so steps – to mom or dad or something else she can hold on to. While it’s not full-on walking as a primary mode of transportation (and therefore not “real” per Sharaun’s definition), it is definitely walking and she’s definitely doing it. I’ll make sure and get some video posted as soon as we get some. And so, another milestone. Now… if she’d only get some more teeth, those two bottom-front ones look so lonely in there…

I don’t know why I’ve not realized this before, but my high-speed provider offers free usenet access. You get capped at 2GB per month and the retention isn’t as stellar or solid as giganews or anything, but it’s pretty awesome. Sometimes usenet is the best place for some lesser-represented music on the major invite-only trackers (especially classic blues, there’s a well-established group on usenet for the genre, but it’s scarce on most private-trackers). So, I hooked that up the other day on the new compy at home and was winging bits through wires in short order. Got some great new vintage blues stuff too, can’t wait to give it all a listen.

Actually, speaking of that blues music, I recently downloaded a collection of recordings from the pre-Robert Johnson Delta blues artist Tommy Johnson, and, as I often do with new musicians I “find,” I decided I wanted to know more about him. I headed over to allmusic.com and looked him up, and it turns out he’s got one heck of a story. Check this out:

The legend of Tommy Johnson is even harder to ignore. The stories about his live performances … are part of it. So is his uncontrolled womanizing and alcoholism, both of which constantly got him in trouble. Johnson’s addiction to spirits was so pronounced that he was often seen drinking Sterno-denatured alcohol used for artificial heat — or shoe polish strained through bread for the kick each could offer when whiskey wasn’t affordable or available in dry counties throughout the South.

Johnson spent most of the ’20s drinking, womanizing, gambling, and playing … when the money got low and apparently, only when the mood struck him. By all acounts, Tommy felt no particular drive to relentlessly promote himself and — while he played music for pay until the very end of his life — he certainly wasn’t as serious about his career as he was about his drinking.

He cut one more stack of great records for the Paramount label in 1930, largely through the maneuvering of fellow drinking buddy Charley Patton. Then the slow descent into alcoholism started taking its toll, the one too many nights of Sterno and shoe polish buzzes reducing his once prodigious talents to small, sporadic flickerings of former genius. He worked on a medicine show … in the ’30s, but mostly seemed to be a mainstay of the juke and small party dance circuit the rest of his days. He was playing just such a local house party in November of 1956 when he suffered a fatal heart attack and went out in probably the exact fashion he wanted to.

Now that’s some hardcore musicianship… a real dedication to the craft. I tip my shiny wingtip to ya, Tommy.

I’ve decided, after Sharaun told me some friends of ours have a similar plan, that I’m going to create a comprehensive “chore chart” for the house. The hope, is that I can standardize a routine that will help both me and Sharaun to better keep up with housework. This may seem anal or unnecessary, but it’s not. I’ve complained again and again and again about the state of our house. Sure, we can clean it up enough in the common areas to where people don’t notice, but I see the backlot, what gets swept under the rug – and it’s filthy. The things I know Sharaun dislikes doing, cleaning the showers and bathrooms, I don’t do often enough. Plus, I’ve tried to explain to Sharaun that keeping a place “tidy” as a lot easier than doing a major “spring cleaning” every few months to sort through the accumulated detritus.

The other day, I threatened to hire a maid – a luxury which somewhat disgusts me, but the threat was hollow and was meant more to “subtly” communicate (for the billionth time) my state of displeasure with the cleanliness of our crib. Of course, she thought the idea was ridiculous – which I thought might spur some re-dedication but instead generated the suggestion of a “chore chart.” Bingo, I’m all over that. I want to have this done next week and put into use ASAP. Sheesh… we gotta get right or this kid is gonna grow up thinking she can leave a trail of waste behind her all the time. I gotta get that chore wheel, y’all.

Goodnight.

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beautiful and nice?


Monday night around 8:30pm. I came home and mowed at lunch, took a little longer than my usual hour trip home but I could afford it. Sharaun had an evening engagement tonight and another tomorrow night, and I didn’t get the chance to mow this weekend after being in China for more than a week since the last pass. So, I took care of it when I could – lunch hour. And now I’m here alone half-watching some Simpsons reruns and writing.

Since getting back in town, I’ve watched two TiVo’d episodes of the new Discovery Channel series Planet Earth – which I’ve found pretty engaging. I’ve always enjoyed “nature” shows when they’re done right, and this one is spectacular, just like all the hype said. One thing it does do though, is increase my yen for a high-definition television – I can already tell the thing would look incredible in HD (even though it probably would be all ugly and stretchy-squashy because nothing seems to be the right shape for the rectangular HDTVs). When are they gonna figure that out anyway? You know when I’ll spend two grand on a TV? When the picture being broadcast “fits” without A) clipping the edges, B) letterboxing, C) squishing people to look all fat, and D) squishing the extreme edges to marginally improve over (C). Yeah, eat that HDTV manufacturers… or TV broadcasters… or filmographers… or whomever is responsible.

While we’re on the topic of TV shows, I was reading a buddy’s blog the other day and hit upon a seemingly simple statement that he and his wife had been reliving some 1980’s moments watching The Wonder Years on TV. He even mentioned the name of the network, something called “Ion.” I was immediately drop-jawed. I’ve pined for Wonder Years reruns ever since the VHS copies I taped off Nick at Nite in the old days were plowed into a landfill. I immediately opened multiple Firefox tabs to kick into high-gear in my search to see A) what the hell the Ion network is, and B) do I get it on DirecTV here in California. Turns out, I freakin’ do get it… and I already had the channel mapped (I think it used to be the WB or UPN or something?)… anyway, two minutes later I had a TiVo season pass setup for the best show on earth, and one that shaped my tween years like none other. Oh Mike… you know not what you have done. Now, if we could just meet somewhere between that snowy place where you are and the sunny place where I am to catch the premier of The Dark Crystal II, I’d be in clover.

Now for some dispatches from last week in China:

My first night in Shanghai, I decided that were I to sleep immediately after getting to the hotel, I’d wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to get back to sleep. My plan was to retire to the bedsheets only upon complete exhaustion. For that reason, when I got to the hotel I showered, redressed, and called a buddy of mine who lives in town. “Beers?,” I asked, “Beers,” he affirmed. Twenty minutes later and we were walking down a pub-lined Shanghai street in search of hoppy goodness. A few pints and a plate of french-fries later, I was climbing into a taxi and handing the cabbie my room keycard to express my desired destination. Now, I’ve been to Shanghai once before, and I’m moderately familiar with certain areas – so I knew enough to recognize that the driver was headed in the right direction. As we neared the area where I knew the hotel to be, I stopped paying attention assuming he’d got it right and wasn’t taking me for a ride (I know that, literally, he was, but I’m using the expression here… well… if you didn’t get it you don’t deserve the explanation).

Soon, we were pulling into the taxi loop at the hotel. The driver stopped and said something to me in Chinese, I glanced at the meter and handed over the requisite 16 yuan. Stepping out of the cab I walked toward the large revolving doors of the hotel. In the elaborate glass doors there were little “pockets” with shrubbery and Chinese-style decor, the whole thing being a large rotating circle split down the center by a glass partition (you’ve no doubt seen the type of door, which is actually harder to describe in words than I’d’ve every thought). Anyway, I remember thinking that I didn’t remember the little pockets of decorations coming into the hotel earlier. Then, as I stepped into the lobby, it hit me: this was not my hotel. Confused for a moment, I walked around thinking I’d perhaps entered through and alternate entrance and was just approaching from an unfamiliar angle. Nope, wrong hotel altogether.

Not knowing what to do, but knowing I was relatively close to my real hotel, I walked back outside and surveyed my surroundings. My head was telling me my hotel was just down the road somewhere, and the way to my right looked most promising by virtue of some big buildings. So, I struck off to the right and soon found myself between two hotels, the wrong one I’d just left and another, the name of which I could not yet see but which ended up being mine (I guess the cabbie had simply dropped me between the two assuming I’d walk to the right one). As I walked in the darkness, a man appeared from the curb and began approaching me with quickness.

“Hi!,” he said. “Oh crap,” I thought, what now? “Beautiful girl, sir?” Ahh… the outside-hotel hustler shtick, a simple pimp trying to move his merchandise, a common occurrence for westerners in China. “No thank you,” I said as I walked on, not stopping to give him more conversation time. “Nice girl, sir!” Nice girl? “Hold the boat!,” the little devil-looking me on my left shoulder began, “Beautiful and nice?!” I turned towards the approaching little man. “Don’t you even!,” harped the the little cherub-me perched on my right shoulder – as he shot a lightning bolt of righteousness at the devil-me opposite him, causing devil-me to explode in a poof of red dust. “No; no thanks anyway,” I mutter as I shuffle away.

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.