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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.

Posted on

bank error in your favor


I’ve been writing and rewriting the topic-major of this entry over the past two days, and I realized it’s as good as it’s going to get. I wanted to convey more, but I couldn’t seem to get the words right… or maybe I don’t have the spirit or attention span to make it happen. Here goes anyway.

We’ll be taking Keaton on her first camping trip this weekend, hoping to infuse her with a love of the modern version of outdoor life. We’ll be packing it in and heading to the coast for a short overnight sleepover in the tent. We’re heading down with a close knot of folks we run with on a regular basis, including those ones with the twins (important, as we’ll not be the only folks with babies on the trip – potential relief from that “baby’s gonna ruin it” apprehension). Sharaun went out and bought a little bug-net cover thing for Keaton’s stroller, and got her some baby sunblock and a cute floppy camping hat. If we can pull it off without all three babies protesting the entire time, it stands to be an awesome adventure – I’ll let ya know how it goes.

The comments on my powderkeg entry this week really pleased me, especially the one from my own mom. I don’t know when I officially became a “grown up.” Maybe it was when I got my first job, or moved out of the house, or bagged my first vagina; maybe it was when I stopped smoking weed, or asked Sharaun to marry me; maybe when I bought a house or started my career – who knows. What I do know, though, is that, with the arrival of Keaton, I feel like I have passed that milestone for sure now. Regardless of how drawn-out and blurry the transition period may have been, I’m now comfortable saying I’m on the other side of it – crossed over. And, along with “adulthood” comes this feeling of wisdom-gained, not to mention shame of things done prior to the metamorphosis. My mom’s comment brought to mind one moment in time I remember from my youth that’s always given me that sense of shame, only more acutely now – now that I have my own child and am beginning to realize just how kids can effect parents. Read on…

I don’t remember how old I was but I’m guessing under 10. I do remember it was my family: mom, dad, me, and my brother all spending a week or weekend or whatever with my mom’s folks up at a cabin on a lake we frequented. I loved that place, they had those plastic paddle-wheel big-tired tricycle-looking contraptions you could take around the lake and a rustic hunting-lodge-esque building overlooking the lake where you could get three meals a day. The cabins were surely rentals, and were small if I remember, but nice. My story takes place with the entire family playing a game of Monopoly on a picnic table outside the cabin one evening. Multicolored money splayed across the table and little green and red plastic houses and hotels cluttering the gameboard – we were deep in the throes of a game and, I, I was losing. It was time to start mortgaging properties, and anyone who knows Monopoly knows that’s a player’s last raspy breaths before death.

Valuable information about me as kid you’ll need before proceeding: When I was a kid, I was a manipulative brat. I had well-formed methods by which I attempted to get my way, mainly through emotional plays and tantrums. These weren’t things which I did subconsciously, but things I’d thought through on a very conscious level, best-known-methods which I’d honed over time for maximum results. Despite how calculating and “grown up” this might sound, it was really nothing more than a bratty, stubborn kid trying cheap tactics to get his way – and breaking down into plain fits when they didn’t work. And folks, that was my endgame strategy – if I wasn’t getting my way, I’d scream, cry, kick, punch walls… whatever it took. I know all kids do this to some extent, but I’m pretty sure I was different, somehow more “extreme.” So much so that I remember my folks taking me to a “family therapist” about it, although my memories of our “sessions” are mostly of me sitting around trying to make the perfect paper airplane. But, that’s another story altogether… and you’re now properly setup for me to continue.

So here I am, something of eight or ten years, losing badly at Monopoly and not wanting to mortgage Mediterranean Ave. to stay afloat. So, I lost it; went completely berserk. I don’t remember all the details, just remember putting all I had into the effort. I’m not sure what my intended results were: the family declaring me winner by default, the banker cutting me a break and slipping me some yellow $100 bills under the table… I don’t know. I do remember, however, that the situation was such that I realized I mustn’t back down from the tantrum – in order to maintain the strategic advantage I perceived I’d built with such fits. So, I escalated, and things got out of hand. Now, the part that brings me shame, the one thing that sticks in my mind and makes me shy away from the memory… is something I overheard my grandmother say to my mom after we were all back in the cabin and things had died down:

“You don’t have control over that boy,” she said to my mom, “What are you doing with him that he thinks he can act like that?” Sure, I’m paraphrasing – but the gist was that I had caused my mother’s mother to question her child’s parenting skills. Even then, young as I was, I knew that must be a crushing blow. Now, as a self-conscious new parent – I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to hear my own mom question how I was raising my daughter.

Sorry mom (and dad), I didn’t really mean it…

Posted on

pure evil


Can you guys actually believe I write on this dang thing like pretty much every day? Sometimes I can’t believe it. You know, it does take time, however easy my consistency may make it look (or, however easy my lack of substance and poor writing may make it look – two sides to every coin). Every day I get a complete entry together I surprise myself. Some days are easier than others, some days I just skip straight up because it’s not in me, and some days I publish something short and off-the-cuff thinking it’s just a notch on the blog bedpost – and it ends up being something I’m really happy with upon reflection.

Browsing my blog stats the other day, I noticed a strange, seemingly inexplicable spike in which entry is the “most read” on the year. Surprisingly, the satanic flier has been sounds familiar’s most popular entry this year, being read a “whopping” 432 times since March (when I reinstalled my stats tracking). Digging deeper, it’s interesting (to me, at least) that that same entry has topped the “daily” most-read stats for an entire month now – being consistently read by visitors between 10 and 15 times each day in April. Odd, right? I did some searching, and turns out the flier is a page-one return for a Google image search on the word “satanic.” Just what I want to be famous for.

I know I’m waaay late to the “Colbert lays into Bush at the White House correspondents dinner” party, but these videos are just too good not to share. So, for those of you who somehow missed the tsunami of internet attention this thing generated this week – here are the videos (the more user-friendly YouTube versions were removed late last night due to “copyright” issues, so I have to just use plain old links to some other website). Watch the 1st part here, and the 2nd part here. Or, if you’d rather, download the entire thing as a Windows Media file here (clocking in at around ~20min).

Made two appointments for Lasik evaluations in the next couple weeks, can’t wear the contacts prior to the consultation – which means glasses only for couple weeks. I’m so dang excited, and the ballpark prices I got over the phone fall right in line with the money received from my CD dump. Eyes! Eyes that can see!

I’ve got nothing… goodnight.

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toting around a powder keg


Luckily, my customer meeting in the bay ended early enough that I was able to catch an earlier flight home – putting me on the ground and at home with enough daylight left to mow the jungle we call our lawn. Blissfully isolated from the cacophony by virtue of my new headphones, I trudged around in the so-tall-it’s-seeding green stuff, stopping every minute and a half to empty the dang bag. It’s high time I got a new mower… it could make the job so much easier.

Before having a baby, I never realized how self-conscious parents can be. Having one myself now, I can tell you that, for me, at least, toting around my powder keg of a daughter can, at times, be very nerve-wracking. The minute she tears off into a crying fit with people around, I immediately feel eyes on me. Some people, likely parents themselves, flash knowing smiles – but in my over-thinking head those same smiles come with hinted undertones and accusations: why can’t you quiet your baby, why’s your baby always upset, are you not a good parent? I know most of these fears are likely unfounded, but I have them nonetheless. I can actually understand why new parents often end up cloistering themselves with other new parents, as they likely feel none of these “all eyes on me” fears when in similarly self conscious company. May sound odd, but I bet I’m not the only one to have felt this way… am I?

No more writey, sleepy.

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hey! all i have to type is ‘y’

Monday, and a hectic one at that. One of those stupid-busy days where you get a invitation at 8am to a 2hr meeting that starts at 8:30am – and every usable minute of time until 5pm is otherwise booked. A frustrating day where you can barely run one task to completion before getting derailed onto something else. And now I have only an early wakeup and flight to the Bay to look forward to… not much in the way of comfort. OK… OK… get ready for some boring crap, you can glaze right over if you don’t care about music and MP3s and whatnot, but you’re not gonna get much otherwise.

As I sat thinking this past Sunday night about my recent CD offload, my mind drifted back to the amount of work that’s stiff unfinished in my CD ripping project. Thus far, I’ve converted nearly 600 CDs to MP3 format, subsequently selling off the now “redundant” physical discs. However, I’ve got that many over again, slightly more actually, left to rip – consisting entirely of bootlegs (the majority being Beatles bootlegs). I chose to rip commercial CDs first because they are commonly available and their information can be located online, merged into most CD-ripping programs, and auto-added to the resultant MP3 files’ ID3 tags. This automated tagging process is great. Bootlegs, however, are by nature unauthorized recordings and therefore not commonly available – and they just don’t auto-tag nicely via CDDB or any other large online database. This leaves he who desires to rip his bootlegs to manually add ID3 tags to his bootlegs – a grueling, arduous process to which I was not looking forward. However, back to my Sunday night thinking…

I started thinking how great it would be if I could auto-import ID3 tag info from the great bootlegzone.com website. Bootlegzone contains album details for nearly every Beatles CD in existence, bootleg or not, as well many other artists. Too bad common MP3 tagging softwares can’t parse that database and grab information… or can they? The Godfather, a completely freeware MP3 tagging application, supports Delphi script add-ons which can be used to parse webpages and import information over already-ripped albums. Could I write a Godfather add-on that could parse bootlegzone.com pages and import the data onto ripped bootlegs? You bet I could, and did. Four hours of tinkering later, and I had a script that reads in bootlegzone.com pages and imports album title, artist, song titles, year, label, and even album artwork in JPG form. You have no idea how much time this will save me. Now I can just give a disc a placeholder title (for later ID) when I rip it, and run the resulting folder through the Godfather/bootlegzone script as post-processing – and all my files are tagged instantly. Sure beats entering song titles and information one-by-one off the back of the CD.

If you’re interested in my Godfather script to read in MP3 information from bootlegzone.com, you can always get the latest version by clicking this link. Note: Before you use this script, please read the 11/11/06 update below and make sure you grab the “automate.scl” file that solves a potential Windows-related filenaming problem.

A general update history for the script is as follows:

  • 5/2/06, Script complete; grabs artwork, track number, track name, album name, artist name, comments, year, and label information from bootlegzone.com disc pages.
  • 5/3/06, Fixed the script to remove the trailing periods after track numbers, tracks now tag-up in the preferred ‘0x’ format. 5/3/06, Fixed an issue where not all tracks were being grabbed (ambiguous string compare), and added some extra error handling to track string ops.
  • 5/4/06, Added “intelligent” support for ‘various artists’ albums. Script will compare album artist to each track artist, and determine if the album is of the ‘various artists’ type. If so, tracks will be named accordingly (i.e. artist_name – track_name).
  • 5/9/06, Fixed a bug in “intelligent” support for ‘various artists’ albums where a track could be skipped if no track artist was specified.
  • 5/14/06, Added support for medley-type tracks (track titles which are simply placeholders for multiple sub-titles). Track grabbing now comprehends sub-tracks of a single track, and combines them into a single track name string. Looking at adding a switch to turn this and the various artists feature off, in case that’s desired.
  • 5/23/06, Added a bit of code to strip underscores from track titles (bootlegzone’s automated entry system relies on underscores, but they do ugly things to TGF’s tag/file case matrix).
  • 11/11/06, Discovered and interesting issue with the script. If you use the bootlegzone.com grabbed ID3 info to rename the corresponding file under Windows, and the combination of the number of characters in the filename and its containing folder are greater than 256 (for NTFS filesystem) – you’ll get a completely unusable file. It’ll rename itself to be longer than 256, and then you won’t be able to rename or delete it. I fixed this bug by changing the “automate.scl” script that I run on the “post processing” after scraping the tag info from bootlegzone. So, here’s the important bit: If you’re going to be renaming files as well as ID3 tags – make sure and use the modified “automate.scl” to avoid the >256 character filename issue. You can download my modified “automate.scl” by clicking this link.
  • 03/12/07, Sadly, www.bootlegzone.com is dead. Unfortunately, all my work is now for naught. I hope that you got some use of the script while the great site that was bootlegzone was around. Thanks for the good years, tilleul.
  • 04/14/07, Bootlegzone has risen from the ashes, and my script is once again useful. Enjoy.
  • 06/01/07, Just a little helpful hint for basic Godfather configuration. I like to name my files with a “track# tracktitle” formatting – no dash, no artist name, no album name. Whatever your preference for filename (we’re not talking ID3 info here), I encourage you to incorporate the track number. This way, you’ll avoid “unable to rename file” errors when an album may contain two ore more versions of the same song (especially common with bootlegs). You can set your renaming mask preference in the “Use Variables” entry-box under The Godfather’s “Rename” tab. I know The Godfather can be overwhelming at first, but this should help avoid confusing errors.
  • 11/25/07, The script now grabs two additional pieces of BootlegZone track information: the “version” and “sub-version” strings (when available). This is a nice improvement, as you’ll get detailed information about the tracks, such as take-number, live venue, etc., embedded in the ID3 tag and filename. The version/sub-version information is appended to the track title string in parentheses. An example of the improved information this addition provides would be as illustrated below:

Previous naming scheme:

01 I Am The Walrus
02 I Am The Walrus

New naming scheme, with version/sub-version data included:
01 I Am The Walrus (Take 2, Overdub)
02 I Am The Walrus (TV, David Frost Show)

Grab the latest version from the link above to get these changes.

  • 06/17/08, Fixed a small bug in the medley track naming routine for the case when there are more than 10 sub-tracks in the medley.  Also refined the naming scheme to account for some bootlegzone medley naming irregularities.

Enjoy it!  Goodnight.