I'm Twittering Game 4. At least a little bit.
Two Awesome Concerts in One Week
Note: I'm writing this while watching Game 4 of the World Series. The Sox have already gone up 1-0 in the 1st. If this entry ends up poorly written, full of nonsense, grammatical errors, and insanity, it's because I'm distracted by the possible 2nd World Series title in 4 years. I also have ridiculously bad hiccups.
Note 2: I also realize that I put punctuation outside of my quotes. I mostly do it when I'm quoting song titles, since I think it's lame to make it looks like the punctuation is part of the song title. I also make up words. Wanna fight about it?
On Tuesday, I made my first ever trip to the Roxy in Boston to see The New Pornographers live. TNP are one of my very favorite bands (#2 on my last.fm profile) and I'd never had the opportunity to see them play live. I wasn't expecting to be completely amazed, because I know they often tour without Dan Bejar and Neko Case, who've got their own bands to tour with. But, lo! there they all were on stage in front of me. The band played a bunch of stuff off of Challengers, the latest album, which I'd previously been underwhelmed by. But seeing the songs live added some new element to them that I hadn't noticed before. Going back and giving the album a more critical listen has definitely caused me to have a new appreciation for the album. It's not Twin Cinema, but it's really good -- and some of the quieter songs (and the Dan Bejar led "Myriad Harbour") are the best on the album and just required me to look past my hopes of a super indie pop album to just a great all around pop album.
The band mixed in songs from all 4 albums, and played every song I really wanted to hear. I was really, desperately hoping to hear "My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism" off of Mass Romantic and as we headed into what was surely the last song, I had come to the realization that I wouldn't get it. And then they busted it out and the mostly knowledgeable crowd bounced a bit and enjoyed the pure pop goodness. Highlights were easily the always phenomenal "The Bleeding Heart Show", the aforementioned "Alcoholism", the crowd faves of "Sing Me Spanish Techno" and "The Laws Have Changed", and then the most surprising of all "Adventures in Solitude" -- a song that I didn't love on the album but have gained a whole new appreciation for after hearing it live.
As usual, there was some less than goodness: the 6'4" guy with the giant block head who pushed his way in front of us so that we could see stuff only over his shoulders; the sound mix was mediocre at best, approaching atrocious; the layout of the Roxy not being nearly as good as the Paradise or TTs for a show.
Normally, that'd be the highlight of the week. But then on Friday, I got to see my favorite band Dear Leader play (#1 on my last.fm profile) play at the Paradise. This came only mere hours after Dear Leader lead singer Aaron Perrino friended me on Facebook (thanks! you rock!). So I was pretty pumped. We got there in time to catch the end of Boone and the entire set by The Russians. The Russians were pretty great, with a pretty strong Beatles vibe. And not in an annoying pretentious way, but in a good way.
But, of course, it was all about Dear Leader. And they didn't disappoint. Playing with probably the most energy I've seen them play with in a long time. They blew through just a great opening of "Nightmare Alleys" and "My Life as a Wrestler", immediately getting the crowd into the show. Making it better, for the most part, this was a Dear Leader-knowledgeable crowd. So when the band busted out "Rivarly", which I haven't heard live in a very long time, the crowd new it was special and reacted accordingly. Everyone was into it straight on through to "Raging Red" (featuring a nice Hall & Oates interlude) and "Labor On" with the crowd on backing vocals. The band came out for a first encore, then a second, which was started off with an aborted, joking attempt at "Give a Little Bit" and the now customary rocking version of "Born to Run".
Other than the group of underage hoochies (scientific term) who proceeded to grind on each other in front of us (and gave new meaning to the DL song "Everyone Looks Better in the Dark"), it was pretty much a flawless show.
Topping it all off, during the show, Aaron Perrino dropped the news that his original band, The Sheila Divine, is reuniting again on December 28th. And I've already bought myself some tickets.
So, it was pretty much a great week (aside from work, which was less great). Two great concerts, the Sox winning the first 3 games of the World Series (and currently leading Game 4 1-0).
Filing Away for Future Use: MySQL Stupidity
We had a database issue the other day. We were losing records in our DNS database. It turned out the table was corrupt and inserts were failing.
We used MySQL's REPLACE INTO to update the table. So, in essence, this is what was happening:
try to insert domain
oh, I can't insert? that means it's already there
delete the existing record
try to insert again
On a happy table, that works just fine. The INSERT fails initially because the table is corrupt, but REPLACE INTO thinks it is because the record exists. So it DELETEs it. Then it tries to futilely INSERT the replacement record, which obviously fails.
Now we're down one record. Oops.
Thankfully, it was easy for us to fix the table and replay the changes and get everything back to normal. Yay. Filing this one away in my brain in case I run into it again.
Evite to Google Calendar Greasemonkey Script v1.4
Hey, I made a small revision to my Greasemonkey script that makes it smarter about handling time (particularly AM/PM).
It's updated here and updated on Userscripts, where I'm up to like 566 installs! I'm a hit! Or something. And I'm like the 4th link in Google if you search for "google calendar evite!"
If you've got Greasemonkey, install your Evite to Google Calendar script right from here.
New TV! Looks Like Old TV!
Through the wonder of the internets, I was able to check out a few of the new fall TV shows via my TiVo. Yay! New TV!
So, then I actually watched them. And new TV didn't seem so new anymore.
Let's start with the worst. "Journeyman" stars the dude from "Rome". Not the really cool dude, but the other one. The less cool one. He plays a journalist (ha, "journ"alist ... "journ"eyman ... ha) in San Francisco who has a British accent that just sort of peeks out every now and then. It's only mildly annoying. It's slightly more annoying when he randomly starts going back in time. It becomes apparent, fairly quickly, that the show will be about him adjusting to the new time he's in and then setting some prior wrong right.
Yep, exactly like "Quantum Leap." Except not nearly as good. The one good bit was that they resolved the marital strife his time traveling caused right off the bat. But, otherwise, this looks like a show that'll make it through half the season before they have to rewrite it and have it take a massive twist because it's just boring.
"Bionic Woman" reminded me a lot of another show. What was the name of it? Oh yeah ... "The Bionic Woman." Except this one tried to be all futuristic and clever. It had one decent fight scene with the villian (Starbuck from "Battlestar Galactica", which is an infinitely better show, as far as I can tell), but like everything else in this show, it was rushed and pretty much pure exposition. You'd think a dorky sci-fi action show would be right up my alley, but I fell asleep twice trying to get through this. The best part is how the main character flips out after becoming bionic, hates everyone involved, but within 10 minutes is fully using her new powers and fighting the bad guys. I guess they wanted to get right into the bionic powers rather than dealing with the potentially interesting story of her struggling to deal with her new powers.
Whatever. I probably won't watch this. It looks like it'll be a worse version of the new Terminator show. Which I haven't seen yet.
Finally, there were two kinda good shows.
"Life" is not about Eddie Murphy being in jail. No, this version is about a cop who was wrongfully accused of a murder and spends 12 years in jail before being freed. Part of his settlement for wrongful imprisonment (besides a bunch of money) is to be put back on the force as a detective. It all stems from him living his zen-like existence and wanting to make a difference ... or is it. Muhahahaha.
Actually, the zen aspect of the main character, and how it affects his perspective and approach to police work is kind of fun and reminds me a good bit of "Raines," a show from last season that I like a lot (about a detective who talks to ghosts in his head). So even if the show didn't have a secondary element, it'd still be worth watching. But there's a nice reveal at the end of the pilot that puts a slightly new spin on the main character (is he as zen-like as he seems) and adds a hopefully nice serialized story to the proceedings. I'll be watching.
Finally, there's "Chuck." Or, as it's also known, "Jake 3.0." It's about a guy who works for the Geek Squad at Best Buy ... umm, I mean the Nerd Herd at Buy More. He's a dork, he's droll, he's Seth Cohen. Hey, wouldn't you know, this the new show by the guy who invented Seth Cohen. Surprise! Chuck gets an email from an old associate and BAM, he knows a bunch of spy stuff he shouldn't. The NSA and CIA send operatives to capture or kill him. They all work together to save stuff.
Ok, so it's a bit derivative of the previously mentioned Jake 2.0 crossed with The O.C. And, given the subject material and the plot, it's a bit lacking in the energy department. That being said, it was really fun. It's obvious that this could be a good, even great show, once it finds its footing a bit. They had to cover a lot of ground in the opening episode, so it's not too surprising that it was a bit uneven. It looks like it'll be worth watching for the first season and a half before it turns crappy like The O.C.
When 99% Isn't Good Enough
My company is at the beginning of a what will end up being a fairly long, exhaustive migration process. Probably on the order of 12-16 months, migrating web sites from a set of servers on one side of the country to a set of servers on the other side. It's not your typical forklift migration (where you actually move the servers and plug them in at their new home); instead, it's literally moving files, mail, DNS, etc. to a new platform.
It's pretty daunting, pretty complicated, and can occasionally be pretty cool.
On the flip side, it's now 2:55AM Eastern in Boston (where I started my day), but I'm in Phoenix where it's actually only 11:55PM. That's a sign that maybe things didn't go quite as smoothly as one would have hoped.
The step we're on is a step where we take over DNS for folks. It's always somewhat difficult, because we'll get a big list of domains and have to figure out whose record (our nameserver's or the other nameserver's) is the "real" record. It's not generally too tough to figure it out (you can judge by the SOA of the records) and the number of domains is usually short of 100k, so as long as you're accurate to within 1-2%, it's not too bad. That's 1000 guys who might break, which is pretty easy to handle with a good support team and some quick script fixes.
Let me take a step back. The process is actually that our nameservers need to become the authoritative nameservers for the domains we're moving. This allows us to later change their DNS to point to their new home, and it all kinda works. We have to get the domains, merge them into our nameservers, become authoritative, and then fix what breaks.
We did that yesterday. Except it wasn't 100k domains. It was 1.2 million. And the domains weren't coming from a single, well-maintained nameserver. They domains came from three, somewhat munged together nameservers. There were internal conflicts, conflicts with our servers, missing zones. A host of issues. We thought we'd worked most of them out and gotten the problems down to, at most, 4-5k domains. That's a lot, but in reality, it's less than 0.5% of the total domains.
"Pretty good," you say.
"Not quite," I say.
For you see, there weren't just three nameservers. There were five. So there's a couple thousand domains we missed. And we also missed some of the conflicts (either by omission or by grabbing the wrong data). In the end, it was closer to 12k domains that were wonky.
That's still only 1%. Damn good, given all of the variables.
Except 12000 broken domains leads to a whole lot of phone calls and emails. And some angry customers. And some tired folks staying up to fix things that they weren't responsible for breaking. And one tired folk--me--staying up because he feels guilty for only being 99% good enough.
DNS is a fickle beast. Thankfully, it's pretty quickly fixable. Once we'd identified some global problems, we could fix them rapidly and put big chunks of the broken domains back in working order.
I often argue with people who think the "Chinese Market" is a valid business plan. You know, the folks who say "hey, if we can just get our product in front of 100 million people, and get 1% of those people to buy, we'll be rich!" Except, of course, it doesn't really work that way. It's hard to get a product in front of that many people who would be interested in buying, and it's hard to get 1% of any audience to buy anything.
Well, not in business plans, at least. It does work that way in technical issues. If you've got a huge enough base of users, the smallest mistakes can have a big impact on your company and team. In these cases, sometimes being 99% accurate isn't good enough.
Here's a graphical representation:
You see, with 100k domains, you never quite reach screwed. It's manageable.
With 1.2 million domains, you're pretty much totally screwed.
Plaxo ... Not Quite the Bees Knees of Sync
For a while now, I've been looking for a good way to sync the calendar on my Macbook to Google Calendar to my Outlook at work. It'd be nice to be able to know what my next day at work looks like in Outlook, then to have my Calendar sync'd down to my laptop so that I can see and adjust things while offline, then sync it all back to the master calendar in Google Calendar.
It shouldn't be that tough, but so far, it has proven elusive. I've tried some of the free tools that are around to sync iCal with Google Calendar and Outlook with Google Calendar, but they've all proved a bit wonky.
Finally, Scoble mentioned that Plaxo had it's new beta that would do all of the syncing through a nifty web application. So, I headed over to Plaxo.com and tried it out. It seems pretty straight-forward. You add "sync points", which are places that Plaxo will sync your data to. I added Google Calendar, my Mac, and my work Outlook. The latter two required the installation of some software. Nothing too difficult. A couple of config tweaks later and I saw my work calendar in my Google Calendar and sync'd down to my Mac.
Perfect!
Except, over the following few days, I would constantly get duplicate calendars, lose the original calendar, get duplicate entries, continually have to tell Outlook which calendars I really wanted, which it would ignore and keep syncing other ones.
It became a royal mess.
So, I decided to uninstall things, get back to square one, and at least retain my Google Calendar the way it was. Except Plaxo ate my two calendars (because they no longer existed in Outlook ... lesson: kill your sync points before killing your calendars). That kinda pissed me off. Thankfully, my Mac still had my calendar, so I was able to dump the ICS entries and upload them to Google (import of ICS files is a nice feature of Google Calendar, by the way!). I lost my music calendar, but it was mostly older stuff at this point, so I started that one over.
Plaxo just didn't work for me, though it seems like it could be useful if they work the kinks out. It didn't sync to Google Calendar fast enough, which was always a bit annoying. The apps for the Mac and PC were kind of clunky, but they worked ok. But borking the calendar syncing was just a bit too much to deal with at this point.
So, I'm back to just subscribing to my Google Calendar feeds through iCal. I'm going to try gSync for about the 4th time and hope that the final release version is finally good enough to maybe think about using full time.
It'd be cool if Google solved this problem themselves (maybe opening up the GCal API), but I'm not holding my breath.
Evite to Google Calendar Greasemonkey Script v1.3
I'd noticed a couple of problems with my Evite to Google Calendar script, so when I got an Evite today, I took some time to figure out how to fix it. I fixed everything I could find, and made the script a bit more robust at handling future Evite changes. So, if you've been having problems, give it another shot and hopefully it'll work for you now.
Install Evite to Google Calendar Greasemonkey Script v1.3
You can also install it from UserScripts, like 387 other people.
Long time no see
Almost exactly one month ago (maybe closer to five weeks), I started feeling just a little ill. Back pain and general overall soreness, just enough to make me feel uncomfortable. About a week after the pain started, I added a ~101 degree fever to the mix. It's Memorial Day weekend, and I'm laying on my couch trying to figure out what's going on and if I need to hit the hospital. I'm pounding ibuprofen like they're candy (and I'm not big on taking any sort of medicine), just trying to keep the fever down and the back pain from causing me to want to punch walls.
After about 3 days of the fever, I got into the urgent care clinic to see a doctor who did some quick work, ran a couple of tests and diagnosed me with a kidney infection. It explained all of my symptoms. So, he prescribed some antibiotics and sent me on my way. Things seemed to work. Within a few days (all of which I spent at home, as I was unable to head into the office), my fever was generally gone, I had almost no back pain, and generally felt ok.
Except for a sore throat. My throat started to feel, for lack of a more scientific term, "icky" pretty much as I finished the antibiotic run. It started to swell, and I could see the trademark white spots that indicate strep throat.
Perfect.
So, on a follow-up visit, my doctor checked my throat. Could be strep, but it seemed unlikely. Could be thrush, my body's reaction to the antibiotics. Or, very unlikely, it could be mono.
Mono would explain everything, but I hadn't been tired and the symptoms had come serially, not at the same time. It would, at least, be an odd case of mono.
A day later I found out it was an odd case of mono.
So, for another 8 days or so, I dealt with the sore throat. There's nothing they could prescribe. I probably took somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 ibuprofen and two full bottles of NyQuil/Tylenol stuff (to soothe my throat and keep a cough down) over that week or so.
Finally, I had a few days of being tired, sleeping 10 hours of night and waking up wanting to sleep some more. But, I was able to rejoin normal life -- playing a little softball, going out a few times, even taking in a concert (Dear Leader, yay!).
So, that's why I've been MIA from my wonderful blog. I've been getting my ass kicked by mono. But, given all the research I've done, I've held my own. Most mono cases seem to be a bit more ass-kicking than mine was, and generally last a bit longer. It's been just about a month, maybe a week longer, from start to finish. I'd say, at this point, I'm at almost 100%. The last two days have seen the last remnants of my cough go away, and I've been able to exercise and even run without feeling too bad. Later this week, I'll have an ultrasound to make sure my spleen is normal size. If it is, I'm good. If not, well, who knows. I'm betting that I'm given the all clear.
Hopefully, I'll settle back into a more regular writing schedule. Being sick, combined with work, combined with some other "real life" stuff has taken up some time that I'd normally devote to blogging. But, hopefully I'll get energized to write again and be a bit more prolific. I've got some interesting work stuff, some tech stuff, and hopefully some music stuff to write about.
In the meantime, here's my mea culpa for having been MIA. Won't happen again. Promise.
What Do You Do When You're Sick?
Around Wednesday I started feeling sore -- an achy back and neck. It got progessively worse (from handleable to requiring a few Advil every couple of hours) until Saturday when I had a fever, headache, and even worse back pain. It was a fantastic way to start a long weekend.
So, given that I was going to be spending a majority of my time on the couch or in bed, most of it was going to be consuming a bunch of the media that had been collecting over the past few weeks. 10 or 12 podcasts, 3 Netflix DVDs, and a whole bunch of season finales on my DVR (Heroes, Lost, Veronica Mars). With work and the generally nicer weather, a variety of things have been building up across my network.
It's an odd feeling to be anxious about the things building up on your "convenience" devices (DVRs, iPods, DVDs-by-mail). The whole point of these tools is to make life more convenient (which they do!), but the downside is that from time to time, when you've been really enjoying the convenience, you get to a point where you're not sure how you're going to get through all of the media you've saved up. It's an oddly daunting feeling.
It's the downside (if you can call it that) of the "digital-content-at-your-convenience-era". Media overload.
After spending a whole bunch of time on the couch, I've made it through most of the TV on my DVR. I've still got 7 or 8 hours of podcasts to get through, but I'll make up that time at work (just one of the benefits of working at a computer). Hopefully, I'll get through one more DVD, too, which would make this little bout with what seems to be the flu about as successful as it could be (minus the night sweats, fever, and inability to sleep).