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oh how i’d miss the porn


Lasik tomorrow. Ben asked me if I was nervous about putting my eyes nuder the knife/laser. My immediate answer was “no,” as I’m actually not that nervous about it. Perhaps naive considering it’s elective surgery and has inherent risks – but my confidence has been so bolstered by the successes of my friends who’ve undergone the procedure, and the success rate overall. The only time I do get a tad “concerned” is when I think of it in terms of putting my vision on the line – more specifically, when I think that the worst possible result could be permanent blindness. I know this is incredibly rare (one out of millions, according to the stats), but boy… would that blow. As small a concern as it is, I have caught myself shutting my eyes tight for brief moments over the past week, in an attempt to get an idea what it might be like to be sightless for good. I know it’s a bad point of comparison, as I can simply open my lids and have the world once again revealed to me – but it does provide a bit of realism to the thought. At least, if I go blind, I’ll still have music. But porn, people… oh how I’d miss the porn.

Funny how things can change so much from day-to-day. It was just yesterday I wrote about being frustrated at work, and then this morning I went in and reopened stale tasks with a new vigor. Maybe writing about it was my own form of catharsis or something. Whatever happened, I just went in this morning and grabbed the reigns again. The afternoon was largely made up of meeting with various folks to inform them of the new direction I’m pursuing – all of which went well. For the moment, at least, I feel like I’m back in the game and contributing again. I guess it really could be as simple as being a work-only manic-depressive…

Let’s do a quick-bits roundup: Sharaun talked to her mom today, I guess all the ladies she works with now have a picture of our daughter being chased by a bear as their Windows desktop wallpapers. This makes me happy. Have successfully ripped and tagged over ~14GB (~4000 files) of Beatles bootlegs with my best-use-of-wasted-time Godfather script. I’m now on the home stretch, having nearly all my discs completely digitalized. It’s taken a couple years, but it was worth (or will be) worth it. Been working my “best albums of 2006, so far” list (a new “thing” I’ve been wanting to do here), and it’s coming along nicely. Aiming for sometime in June (y’know, to kinda reinforce the whole halfway thing). OK, done with that stuff.

I know I’ve written about edgewoodhospital.com before, but it’s inspired at least another paragraph. Let me first reiterate how much I love the site. Not only is it a timepiece for several generations, it’s gained quite a following of regulars who are digging up old pictures and posting them. These snapshots of parties past at Edgewood elicit the best comments from the site’s readers. People recognize people, recognize events, relive and share memories… I only wish I had some pictures like that from all the stuff we did as kids. We didn’t have an Edgewood where we’d go drink Budweiser and smoke Marlboros, but we did have several other “hangouts” where we could safely indulge in the excesses of youth while remaining relatively free from “the man.” Our main ones were: the pits, Skyview, the tracks, Barton extension, Hoo-Hoo, and BP. We had some good times at all those places, even spent the night at one of ’em a couple times – camped out in our cars, too stoned to want to leave. I wish I could make a site enshrining our teenage haunts, something along the lines of edgewoodhospital.com where folks could create accounts, upload old pictures of of kids being kids at those sacred places… comment on photos and carry on conversations. I would do it, but I have doubts I’d be able to properly publicize it – and it’d stagnate. But it sure would be fun to work on…

Any old cronies from the Rock read this? Anyone down? Leave me a comment if so.

And, before I go, just so Sharaun doesn’t read this and give me grief for talking about porn where anyone and their brother can go read it – I wouldn’t really miss the porn. I’d miss the internet, but the loss of porn would be an easy tradeoff. OK? Summary: Dave = not into porn as much as the tongue-in-cheek title may insinuate (it’s comedy, remember).

Goodnight.

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work-shirking


Lots of words, little to say. Random stuff I put together to make an entry.

So what do you think folks? I mean, about the blog, that is. How’s the blog doing these days? Still keeping your interest? Still inserting enough media and humor and current-event stuff to be relevant and entertain you? I dunno, I’m not thinking of giving up or anything – just interested in a blog “physical” of some sorts… wondering what’s working and what’s not. Strange I guess, when, ultimately, I don’t care… I’ll write what keeps me writing in the end. But I try to keep a good pace: funny stuff, pictures, charts, etc. I feel like I post often enough to consider myself a “regular” blogger, not some fly-by-night joker who posts next to never. I think I’m doing a fine job… right?

Does being a dad make you dumber?

I, for one, am beginning to wonder. Before we had Keaton, I prided myself on my ability to multitask, think clearly and logically, and plan with multiple contingencies. I was the “solid” one between Sharaun and I: the one who paid the bills, the one who would’ve been on time had she not held me up, the neat-freak, etc. But now, something seems off… ever since Keaton was born, I feel sometimes like all my cylinders aren’t firing properly.

Take for instance Sunday night, we had been invited to a birthday soiree down at the local pizzeria for a friend of ours, had known about it since early in the week and was actually looking forward to it. Come Sunday though, Sharaun and I both blanked on it. Sitting on the couch, eating some Chinese takeout, and watching TV – we got a call from someone at the fete asking us, “You guys still coming?” Case #2: After missing my 2nd Lasik evaluation last week, I’d rescheduled for Monday morning – even blocked out my work calendar from 8am-1pm so I’d get no meetings scheduled on top of it. Problem is, I didn’t write down what time the actual appointment was. Feeling like a heel, I just headed up guessing 9am (and got lucky). Strange though, those kinda brain-farts never used to plague me so…

Interestingly enough, I picked up a copy of Scientific American while sitting in the waiting room of that Lasik eval and happened on an article about how women’s’ “multitasking and cognitive” abilities actually increase during pregnancy and after childbirth. In addition, the study noted that fatherhood had quite the opposite effect on men, their multitasking and cognitive abilities showing a decrease upon the miracle of childbirth. Almost like a trade, the man seemingly giving up some of his mental-mojo so his mate can better care for the new life they created (my editorializing). Anyway, it was comforting to see that I’m only getting stupider because of science, not because of anything I’ve done (unless you count making a baby). Now… what the heck was I talking about…

Well, despite a series of hiccups with my Lasik schedule – I did manage to bottom out on price and dates and setup an appointment for lasering this Thursday. That means, as you read this, I have only two more days as someone who’s vision-impaired. I managed to do a little wheeling and dealing, bringing the cost down to something I feel is fair – although I still have this feeling I could get a couple hundred more knocked off if I really played hardball. For me though, I have the money – and at some point during the negotiations I began to feel guilty, quoting “fake” prices I’d got from “other” Lasik places… but I did manage to get the original quote reduced by $400 per eye. That’s on the best laser currently available, at least according to my research. I’m now more excited than ever, and literally can’t wait to go under the knife/laser and get it over with. I have high hopes that I won’t be one of the unlucky 1/10,000 folks for whom the surgery actually worsens their vision… keep your fingers crossed for me, k?

Work has been hard for me lately. Not the part where I get up and go to a building every morning at 8am, not the part where I sit at my desk or go to meetings or send mails. No, not even the part where I meet deadlines. The part that’s been hard has been the actual “work.” With some recent shakeups that’ve been going on, I’ve become horrible unmotivated. Oh, I’m still getting things done, sure… but I haven’t cared for more than a week now. I know this will pass, it always does… and then I realize my “not caring” has put me into a little hole that I’ll have to do double-time to dig out. This is fine with me, it’s a known cycle and I’ve accepted it. It’s almost like I have a manic-depressive or bipolar work ethic. For months I’ll be balls-out, 200% burning the candle at both ends and proud as hell of the work I’m doing. Then the lull will take over, and I’ll go into a “maintenance” phase where I’m simply reactive, doing enough to get by and keeping a low profile. Thankfully, the overdrive times seem to outnumber the lulls, leaving me with a solid B+/A average – again something I’m comfortable with. I don’t see an easily identifiable endpoint to this current funk; Thursday’s surgery won’t help, neither will the long weekend or the following weekend’s planned camping trip. The week-and-a-half long trip to FL in July certainly won’t shore up my dedication, and sunny summer days are like the crack to my work-shirking crackhead personality.

Love ya peoples, goodnight.

Posted on

back for more


Lazy Saturday spent on the couch trying to catch the iPod repeating a song on random; gray and rainy Sunday with a trip to church in the morning and not much more than a banana and some peanut butter to liven up the afternoon. I didn’t have big plans for the weekend, but it’s not like there was a lack of things I could’ve been doing. There’s so much to do around the house. I could’ve fixed the one sprinkler in the backyard that still doesn’t pop high enough; I could’ve fixed the pocket door in our master bathroom, which has been off its track now for probably a year; could’ve replaced the filter in the air conditioner intake thing; could’ve used the blower to clean the cobwebs off the ceiling of our front porch; maybe pulled the plethora of weeds rooted in my backyard. But no, I did none of those things, instead I sat around surfing the web, holding the baby, and listening to music. I did, however, manage to upload a new series of pictures to Keaton’s gallery, so you should go check those out now.

Speaking of Keaton, I’m happy to say that she’s “officially” sleeping through the nights now. The few long ones she had before were encouraging, but since it wasn’t consistent we weren’t quite ready to say it was real. Now, though, she goes down for between 8 and 9hrs each night – sleeping right through to morning. Now, this isn’t that much of a change for me, being as I wasn’t the one waking every 3hrs to stick my teat in her mouth – but I know Sharaun appreciates it. I keep telling Sharaun that if and when we have another baby, we’re gonna be lucky if he or she is half as good as Keaton is. We’ve had it so “easy” with this little one: she’s not fussy, she’s playful and cute, and she’s sleeping all night before 3mos. Keep it up Keaton, I’m fully expecting a valedictorian cheerleader who shuns sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Fingers crossed…

Tech content ahead, readers beware.

After all my surmising and postulating last week about what the cause of my website slowdown was, I think I’m comfortable now saying that I’ve ID’d it and addressed it. Over the weekend I continued to see solid performance from my blog and gallery pages, and my loadtimes on the backend were vastly improved. So what, you may ask, was the issue after all – and what did I do to fix it? I promise this won’t be another long webmaster entry, just bear with me.

The culprit? The Omni Explorer bot. A nasty, dirty, incredibly aggressive bot which was crawling my webapges with such frequency and voracity that it managed to gobble up gigs upon gigs of my bandwidth. I zero’d in on the Omni bot through my usage statistics, noticing it was the number one requester of my site over the past few months. Keying in a simple Google search brought up several folks ranting about the bot, and it’s unquenchable thirst for data. Eventually, I landed on the webpage of the bot’s company, where a goofy-looking apology about its aggressiveness is posted along with instructions on how to block it from indexing a site. In the end, I went with a stricter method of blocking than the Omni Explorer page recommended, as I’d read elsewhere that the thing had been caught ignoring the file they suggest using as a block.

I changed my .htaccess file, uploaded it, and the results were both immediate and amazing. My site sprang to life, responding to requests in a timely manner and looking spry again. And, so far, things have remained that way. So that’s it, the story of how I resurrected my site by denying the raping, ravaging Omni Explorer crawler/bot.

And, before I leave the topic of blogging, I wanted to mention that I added a live spam-comment counter to the sidebar. It shows how many comments the my Akisment spam blocker has currently shot down since it was installed. Check it now, and refresh the page when you’re done reading this entry to get an idea of frequency. Stuff like this is fun for me…

Nerdy stuff over, for those who skipped it.

Before I go, I wanted to pass along a link to what I thought was a great idea: an invitation for folks to list their most “visceral” song moments, right down to the whens and whys of it. I did something similar once, although I think my theme was more “songs that give me chills;” but, it still fits. And what do you know, Teenage Fanclub’s The Concept shows up on both my list and the one linked above. Honestly, it doesn’t surprise me that much – I knew there was something magic about that song the 1st time I heard it… still gives me chills to this day. I actually thought it might be fun to go back and revisit that entry, adding additional information along the lines of what’s on the goodhodgkins.com list (along with the actual song). Maybe sometime this week…

Goodnight, I have nothing more for you.

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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.