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stressed


Happy Friday friends, boring entry for non-techies ahead… I’m afraid. Before you read it, I’d like to say that after writing it – I made some simple changes to my access files, and I’ve been having stellar results thus far. Keep your fingers crossed, maybe I have a working blog again.

If you’re reading this right now, consider yourself one of the lucky few who got through to what’s becoming an ever hard-to-reach sounds familiar. I apologize for the server problems folks, I assure you they are not of my making – in fact I’ve been have trouble finding something to pin the blame on. Right now, I’ve chatted several times with my hosting service’s tech support – and been assured that the server I’m on is functioning just fine – so the problem either lies with my pages themselves, or with the amount of traffic I’m sustaining (and thus asking the server to fulfill). Armed with this, I pored over the server usage logs to see just what might be the culprit.

Suspect #1 is blog comment spam, which has grown to a staggering amount (~3k pieces per day). All this comment spam activity is scripted and targeted at the same piece of PHP code, meaning it’s making numerous simultaneous database requests all day long. Since none of the spam makes it to the main page, I’m happy – but there’s no way to stop the database traffic without turning off commenting altogether, or implementing a login scheme – neither of which are attractive to actual commenters. Suspect #2 is the Coppermine application I use to power my image galleries, as the slowdown coincided somewhat with its introduction. I’ve often wondered if its code is super inefficient or sloppy, but the only way to test is to shut the galleries down for a month and watch the results – undesirable Suspect #3 is my own star-power. That’s right, I may just be too popular for my current hardware. I know, hard to believe – right? Let’s examine the evidence:

Below you’ll see my monthly bandwidth usage statistics from October of last year through February this year. You’ll notice that I was fairly solid around ~1-1.5GB of monthly transfer for an entire year there, up until October 2005 where you’ll start noticing some significant growth through February this year. In February, I hit 4GB transfer on the month – that’s a substantial difference from my ~1GB past year.

Now let’s take a look at March and April of this year. After a fairly smooth rise to the 4GBs of February, something happens and site usage freakin’ takes off over the past two months. Doubling over the course of March to a whopping 8GB and then increasing another gig in April to 9GB.

You think it’s a coincidence that Keaton was born on February 27th? That entry certainly generated some increased interest in the blog, and perhaps even bumped up my regular readership to some degree… But what are people looking at? Digging deeper below, they’re looking primarily at this very page. Viewed ~20,000 times in the month of April. However, some percentage of that, maybe 10%, is me writing and refreshing; and my blog-specific stats program clocked “unique” visitors at ~9,000, meaning half of those 20,000 hits were repeat customers. That’s impressive to me, especially since it doesn’t count web spiders and other forms of bots or indexers (which, incidentally, made up about 12% of April’s 8GB of transfer). The data below also shows that my image gallery is the clear runner-up to sounds familiar, being viewed 9,000+ times on the month.

Yeah, so what?, you may ask. 10GB monthly and 20,000 hits is peanuts, really. Especially when my hosting package allows me 250GB on the month. So why am I so bogged down at less than 10% of my allotment? I still have no idea, and I’m actively pursuing it with my host. As soon as I can find some relief, I’ll make the changes – I’m even willing to spend more money monthly if it comes down to it. As of now, I’ve taken some aggressive steps to block some greedy bots and spiders from aggressively crawling my domain – hopefully it’ll give some relief. Thanks for sticking with me through the crapiness… I appreciate your patience.

Before I close the topic, however, some random stats I enjoyed:

  • 83% of you come to my blog via a bookmark, while 13% arrived via a search engine.
  • Of you 13% who arrived via search engine, most of you came from a Google image search for “spider bites.” The next biggest chunk of you were searching on the term “crumbelievable.”
  • If you were referred to my blog, it was likely from myspace.com. Although I don’t understand this, and can’t find a link from myspace to me, that site accounts for 27% of my non-spam referral traffic.
  • In April, 13% of pharaohweb.com’s 9,828 unique visitors bookmarked a page (that’s 1,324 people).
  • 23 people visited my pages from a WebTV console. They still make those?
  • 80% of you are here and gone in 30sec, only 8% stick around as long as 2min. On the other hand, 212 of you were here for more than an hour. 30sec… what the eff is that?

I had big plans to write something here at the end with a little more meat, but I don’t have it in me. Until Monday, I aced another week. Love you.

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run #83


Sometimes I sit and wonder about all the fancy, high-tech, top-secret experiments that are likely being carried out all over the world at any given moment.

Somewhere at MIT, students are hurtling particles down long accelerator arms toward a measurable collision; somewhere in Germany, chemists are synthesizing new proteins and seeing how they interact with other substances; somewhere in China, nuclear scientists in white lab coats might be working on a new form of nuclear power – unstable now but with hopes of making it viable. All over the globe, humankind is pushing the boundaries of knowledge – doing experiments to watch and study the results. Yes, all across the Earth things which have never been done or observed before are being done – all just to satisfy a curiosity… to see what happens. Without this kind of experimentation and curiosity, we’d never have come as far as we have. Without Rutherford firing particles at gold foil, Mendel’s selective breeding, or Otto’s combustion engine – humans would be a long way from where we are now.

When I sit and think about it, all the groundbreaking experiments going on, all the potential discoveries and curiosities being satisfied – my mind takes a darker turn. One day, while waiting to “see what happens” as the outcome of one of those experiments – something may go wrong. What if the results of a new experiment are unexpected? Run #83 of a series of 10,000 tests making up a battery of experiments, for example. Run #83 creates an explosion big enough to destroy the entire Earth. Just think of it, a team of scientists casually watching their experiment run through its paces… noting results as the computer captures loads of data… sipping coffee and discussing physics – when up comes test #83. One minute detail in thousands of parameters is tweaked ever-so slightly and bang… the end of everything. Yeah, I think about that from time to time. A massive wave of destruction starting from a physics lab at a Brazilian university and overtaking the universe – all because some grad students were experimenting with gravity in an attempt to study black holes. A flash of light and life as we know it ends, billions of years of evolution erased because one researcher was trying to turn water into a viable replacement for fossil fuel. Poof. Every day, there must be millions of experiments happening at any given moment…

What will you be doing when run #83 vaporizes you, only a flash of light for warning before you cease to exist?

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the way soldiers salute the president


Today blew. Got horribly lost on the way to my 2nd Lasik consultation/evaluation – making me irreparably, showing up after the doctor had already given up on me. This means that I had to push out my 2nd evaluation, the one I was planning to use as a bargaining chip, until next week. And, because I have no basis for price-matching either surgeon down until I’ve had the other evaluation – I had to reschedule the surgery I booked for this Friday. Bummer… but I figure I can wait another week. You shoulda seen me though, lost in some remote part of town, furious at myself and stressing at 150% like I always do when I’m late for something… I had a headache in an instant. I couldn’t even enjoy the windows-down drive in our excellent 80 degree sunny temps. Woe is me… my life is so tough.

Biding my time while on the can the other day, I made it through another issue of Maxim. Not done with the restroom, I had no choice but to also begin reading the ads at the back. That’s when I came upon the ubiquitous back-of-a-mens-mag penis pill pitch. In a full-page spread peppered with bold, red block-text and lots of suggestive pictures of couple in various states of undress – a company was selling a “pill for male enlargement.” Standard enough, I figured. Heck, 50% of the comment spam this blog gets is for penis enlargement – so it must be a booming business. After all, I suppose there are some men with 11″ dongs who’d want just that little bit more… in case they ever bed a porn star or something. I found some of the ad pretty good, thought I’d share it here – although it’s not graoundbreaking comedy by a long shot… these ads are written to be made fun of. So, you can say I took the easy way out by picking an easy target for jokes, so be it. Some of the claims made in the very wordy pitch:

A longer and thicker penis even when you are not hard. Because there is more blood flow, your penis “hangs” larger all day.

I dunno why they put “hangs” in quotes, perhaps to add emphasis to the nature of the verb “hanging,” such that images of gravity pulling downward on an immense weight come to mind.

Just imagine when your sex partner sees how thick and long and hard you are. Men will gasp with envy the first time they see the new you in a locker room, shower or gym.

As a man, I resent this. The notion that I would “gasp” at another man’s penis is an insult to me. Unless of course, that man’s penis was 4ft long and shouting racial slurs at a funeral. Actually… it really wouldn’t even have to be a penis for me to gasp in that case – shouting racial slurs at a funeral is just plain-out cause for gasping… I’m just trying to keep this related to the penis bit.

You will feel in total command because now any possibility of going soft, and premature ejaculation will be eliminated with your new rock hard much larger penis.

I’ve always wanted to feel “in total command.” In fact – if I’m gonna be in total command, I’m going to have to ask that my sex partner salute me. You know, the way soldiers salute the president? I’m also going to need some medals and a hat that makes me look “in charge” of shit. I want to walk into the bedroom, rock hard penis leading the way a full 15″ ahead of me, sex-medals pinned to the flesh of my bare chest, and have my buck-naked sex partner snap to attention on the bed and salute me. And I want a crisp salute! None of that limp-wristed crap or there’ll be no rock hard penis tonight.

We also included some of the same type of herbs found in Polynesia where the men of the Mangaian tribe have sex on the average of three times a night, every night. While this is not what you may desire, it is nice to know that your sexual performance can improve substantially.

“While this is not what I may desire?” I’ll say. Have you seen any Mangaian women? Those skanky she-males are so hard up for mansword they’d bone me three times a night. No thanks, buddy, you can slay Mangaian women thrice nightly if it’s your cup of tea – I’ll settle for someone who’s hookworm-free once or twice a week. They do it with monkeys too, you know… those herbs don’t discriminate.

Because you are longer you penetrate more sensitive areas of the woman.

I’m hoping for her back teeth. Those mofos can be quite sensitive for some. They’ve even got special toothpaste for women who’s back teeth my new penis will batter during sex. Sensodyne: “For when your teeth hurt because his rock hard penis pounds them during the three (or more) bouts of freaky Mangaian sex you have every night.”

Well, that’s it for me. Canned content, if you must know… because I needed to hit the sack early (midnight) to wake up around ~4am and head to Oregon, again. The last of the travel, mehopes. Goodnight friends and lovers.

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what can i do to get you into these eyes today?


Uneventful Monday, other than what’s in the paragraph below. This week is full of holes for me, effectively useless from a work standpoint. Monday and Tuesday morning shot with Lasik consultations, Wednesday gone to a day trip to Oregon, and Friday consumed by my eyes getting lasered. My only full day in the office being Thursday… not that I mind, but I just feel so disconnected from work lately. Sharaun’s out running errands, and I’m at home tending Keaton. After several circuits of the living room and hall in her dad’s arms, she’s now sleeping quietly in her swing – looking a little angel far from the screeching banshee I struggled with just 10min ago. My website is still acting up, no help from the hosting company as yet – which saddens me as they’ve been so responsive over the years. Today I either hit a run of good luck, or the server was acting as it used to – because my page loads were fast and enjoyable. But as I try to post tonight, I’m hampered by timeouts and slow-loads. Who knows folks, I may end up having to switch hosts out of this whole deal… something I’m not looking forward to at all. Well, I think that’s a sufficient expository paragraph, eh? Yes then, let’s move along shall we?

Went in for my 1st Lasik evaluation this morning (you can read that as yesterday, since I’m writing from the past). It was a loooong experience: a battery of exams with a bit of good old fashioned salesmanship thrown in. There are several options: lasers, better lasers, tear-duct protein plugs, higher-order aberration correction, power windows and ABS, etc. It was clear to me that the Lasik business is a very lucrative enterprise – so much so that your ability to wheel and deal is huge. I casually mentioned that I was getting evaluations at a couple other major surgery outfits here in town, and was immediately offered “their lowest price minus 10%” as price-matching. I’m fully confident that I won’t end up paying more than 80% of the original prices I was quoted once I’m done shopping around and pitting surgeons against each other for my business. Seems odd… bargain-hunting for elective surgery… but there are so many places that do it and it’s become such a competitive industry – it works to the consumer’s benefit. Either way, I’ve got my surgery scheduled for Friday morning – with the caveat that I can call in my lowest “shopped around” price and get 10% off that anytime prior to the procedure.

Goodnight.

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catching up


I apologize for my website of late, the performance is horrible. The page either loads incredibly slow, or times out altogether. I have no idea what’s causing this, but am fairly certain it’s nothing of my doing. I’ve been running the same pages with the same scripts for quite a while with decent performance… and all of the sudden things are gummed up. I’ve narrowed it down to any page which accesses one of my MySQL databases (as both this page and my gallery pages do), so it seems the problem lies there… somehow. I have noticed a sharp increase in the amount of spam comments the blog gets, up to about ~3000 per day now – and that might be the culprit. I wrote to my host’s tech support – but so far they’ve only offered me an upgrade package to a dedicated server (rather than the virtual slice of a server I now share with others). This sounds appealing to me, but also ticks me off… I should be able to expect my pages to work. For crap’s sake I only have a measly three databases and a handful of scripts that call them. So, dear reader, I’ll do what I can to fix the situation – but until then I apologize if your experience here is frustrating.

But, just to make it all the more frustrating – here’s a link to Keaton’s gallery, where I’ve uploaded some annotated snaps from our weekend in Oregon which you’ll read more about below. Oh yeah, today’s entry is mad disjointed… and I make no apologies, as it was written in fits over the last week, often for entries not posted (as the gaps in writing last week make evident).

Let’s get started with random paragraph #1.

The other night on TV 20/20 ran a story about a girl who had to have half of her brain removed, due to a rare brain disease that was causing her to have debilitating seizures. Yes, it was a storyline on a popular medical drama recently. Anyway, they showed video footage the girl’s family took when she was a baby – and cut to her parents saying how happy they were when she was born that they got a “healthy baby.” Yes, aren’t we all… it’s what we all hope for, a healthy child with ten fingers and ten toes. But, when this family’s little girl turned four – something went wrong. I think about that all the time, how things can look so normal and right for so long – and then, seemingly out of the blue, go so terribly wrong. I think about that with our daughter, how perfect she is, how healthy and happy and beautiful. Watching a show like that before Keaton tugged at my heartstrings, watching it now that I have Keaton – it full-on hooked my heartstrings up to the Concorde and took flight.

Continuing with random paragraph #2.

Showering at my folks’ place these past few days, I noticed that their guest bathroom is stocked with a bottle of “body wash” instead my preference a bar of soap. I never did get into the “body wash” thing, just doesn’t equate to a bar of soap to me… leaving my skin feeling all slimy when I draw my fingers across it, instead of the squeaky clean of soap that I like. Anyway, I picked up the body wash to check it out – and read the following off the back label:

We know how special your bath or shower time is…a place for you to be private, reborn, where creative thoughts visit.

Reborn? For me, my bath or shower time is more like a time for me to wash the stink off my ass, sweat off my balls, and grease off my face (although not necessarily in that order). Who are these people for whom bathing is a religious experience? Although, I guess, I can’t argue with the “creative thoughts” coming to visit part – as this whole bit was indeed inspired by a shower…

And, random paragraphs #3 and #4, written last week but never posted.

Why are large conference/meeting rooms always unable to cool themselves properly? It seems like every time I find myself congregated with a large group of folks in big conference room, I’m sweating balls. You’d think that engineers designing these big conference rooms for hotels and the like would take this into consideration and install cooling that could handle capacity. Ugh… now my face is greasy and I’m getting sleepy, thanks a lot hot conference room.

The trip to Oregon has been a huge success thus far. Keaton must have her dad’s genes because she traveled like a seasoned pro – making nary a peep and sleeping the entire time. Last night Sharaun and I slept with her lain betwixt us, which we’ve never done before – partly for fear of rolling over onto her mid-sleep. Well, we didn’t roll over onto her, and I really enjoyed the experience. It may sound dumb, but I loved waking up in the middle of the night and seeing her sleeping face just to my left, her little pink-clad arms flung up above her head just like dad does when he sleeps, her little chest rising and falling and making soft breathy sounds through her tiny nose. I want to describe it as “intimate,” but that sounds kinda pedo… so maybe I won’t.

Let’s end this mess just as randomly, shall we?

I’m so excited about the news that Thom Yorke is doing a solo record, I can’t wait to see what he does with his “spare time.” I certainly love the woodcut-esque flash animation on the frontpage of his solo-centric webpage – I the imagery there is in any way representative of the album’s vibe, I’m down. I’m also excited because the new Sufjan leaked… a full two months in advance of the album’s official release. I’ll write more about it once I’ve had the time to properly digest it.

Well, today (Monday) is the 1st of my two Lasik consultations, with surgery possible as early as this Friday. I’m so pumped folks, so pumped. Talk to you all later, Dave out.

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once more to the skies


Not much meat today, but I didn’t want to do one of those skip-two-days things again. We fly to Oregon tomorrow (we’re already gone as you read this), for a work/vacation thing (I work Wednesday through Friday, hang with the folks in the evenings and on the weekend). Keaton’s first flight, and we have to roll out of bed at the ungodly hour of 3am in order to get ready and catch out 6am flight. Wish us luck, OK?

Work’s got me in a rut… some recent goings-down there have shaken up my responsibilities and rendered a good part of the planning I’ve done over the last six months moot. Gave me occasion to sit aimless for a bit, without direction, wondering where and how to get back into things. I’m reluctant to go back and redo all my careful planning, as I’m somewhat concerned the dust hasn’t quite settled and it may all be for naught. I will admit, though, that a Tuesday with no direction and no solid deadlines was kinda nice…

Progress on ripping the very last remnants of my CD collection is moving along swiftly, thanks to the bootleg-wizard script I wrote to tag-up the resultant MP3s. I’m working through the Beatles at a breakneck clip, and excited about the prospect of finally getting down to zero physical CDs and an all-digital music library. Well, to be honest I do have plans to box up some of my original Beatles bootlegs and store them for safekeeping – as they’re rather rare and have a high sentimental value. But all the CD-R copies of stuff I traded for over the years is going right in the bin – trash.

Until Oregon, goodnight.

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firsts


A weekend of firsts: First night away from home with little Keaton; Keaton’s first camping trip; Keaton’s first time to the ocean; and Keaton’s first night slept entirely through (she’s been doing ~6hrs for about week, but Sunday night she went 11 hours – in a tent no less). Camping was good, but freezing – windy and in the low 50s / high 40s at night. We bundled Keaton tight, and she really seemed to enjoy being outside. Laying down in the tent must’ve seemed like a circus-colored light show to her, with the wind blowing the canvas walls in and out and the sunlight playing through the trees we were pitched under. I’ve posted the Keaton-specific pictures from the trip in a new gallery, and the more general camping-related pictures in another new gallery – go there or be square.

Speaking of galleries and pictures, I made some simple optimizations to my Coppermine gallery script (the machine behind my photo galleries). I’d had problems with slow loading and updating, and most annoyingly I was getting SQL “max_questions” exceeds errors (seems Coppermine is pretty liberal in the number of SQL SELECT statements it does, and my server limits me to 5000 per hour). I actually think it’s Google’s robot spidering the images that was constantly pushing me over the limit – but regardless of the culprit it was annoying to have the gallery go down for an hour at a time. I added a brilliant bit of randomization to the SQL user, so the gallery will run the SELECT statements with one of four different users each time, randomly. This way, I can effectively have 20000k queries per hour. What’s more, it seems to have greatly improved the speed of the galleries – maybe by deserializing all the queued SELECTs from a single user. Either way, it seemed to be working well over the weekend – but I did get a couple slow loads… we’ll see how it works under the “strain” of all my readers.

Tomorrow, Monday as I write, is gonna be a busy one. Unfortunately, I had to cancel this first of my two much-looked-forward to Lasik consultations… to schedule some last-minute meetings at work. Things were thrown into the air at work Friday, as some major shakeups went down. So much so that my planned travel this week is now up in the air, which is tough because I was using the trip to Oregon to get to my folks’ place for our Mother’s Day visit (Sharaun is meeting me there Wednesday). Now, however, I don’t even know if my work-related travel is still on – although the trip to the grandparents’ place still is, meaning I may have to find my own way there… which may or may not be on the same flight as Sharaun and Keaton. Not a big deal, it’s just that, me being anal, I like to know how I’m getting where I’m going – especially when it’s Keaton’s first plane trip. It’ll work out I suppose.

Three songs from the to-be-released new Radiohead album leaked in live form this weekend, from a recent Thom & Johnny outing – and they’ve got me salivating for this thing. Also, tickets for the show at Berkley’s Greek Theater (a short jaunt for me) go on sale next weekend… and I’m just dying to find a way to go. Too bad I’ll be out of town the day they go on sale, as I know I stand no chance online and the phones will be jammed. I’d love to see them again, any chance I can get really… maybe Sharaun and I can hire a babysitter… or I can take a night off and head over with someone of similarly excellent musical taste. Maybe… just maybe…

Blogging this week could get sparse, as we’ve got more firsts for Keaton which may end up taking precedence: first trip on a plane, first time meeting grandpa on dad’s side, and mom’s first qualifying mother’s day. Until tomorrow, take care out there in the real world… and we’ll do the same here at sounds familiar.

Goodnight.