![[caedmonscall.net]](http://rocksmyfaceoff.net/images/rmfo/ccneticon.jpg "The Official Fan Site for Caedmon’s Call.")
![[derekwebb.net]](http://rocksmyfaceoff.net/images/rmfo/dwneticon.jpg "The Official Fan Site for Derek Webb. (Last updated 07/03/2004 04:24)")
![[rmfo-blogs.com]](http://rmfo-blogs.com/images/rmfoblog.png "An experiment in Weblogs for community members.")
![[rocksmyfaceoff.net]](http://ijsm.org/wordpress/wp-content/themes/ijsmorgv3/images/rmfoicon.jpg "The server I run.")
Why I’m Happy Today
- New contracts at work.
- A great night of sleep.
- Caedmon’s Call is no longer on Essential. Given how I never bought the last record, you know I’m thrilled by this.
Wed 31 May 2006
The New and Improved [caedmonscall.net]
Ta-da! This job is only three years in coming [and, fairly, isn't yet fully complete].
More is on the way. 
links for 2006-05-31
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Just when I hadn’t downloaded any ES in a while…
Tue 30 May 2006
Comment Spam Hammering
I haven’t written about comment spam in forever, mainly because I have a toolset that works for me. I’m writing this morning, though, because I’ve gotten ~4000 spams hitting IJSM.org in the last day. Overnight? 2600+. Clearly, someone is paying some enterprising coders pretty well this week.
Never forget: comment spam isn’t personal, and it is a money maker for the spammers. That’s their whole motivation.
UPDATE at 15:04:
There are currently 0 comments in moderation
There have been 4877 comment spams caught since the last digest report 1 day ago.
The beautiful thing, though, is that my server is not even batting an eyelash. My load average is consistently <1 [and 4.0 is full utilization on this box].
Mon 29 May 2006
Geof’s New Music: 28 May-3 Jun 2006
I really didn’t intend to have this much new music, but:
- I had some Cardigan bootlegs I wanted to get to Andy, and I saw him in concert with Caedmon’s yesterday.
- I had a backlog of BMG orders in that I had alread planned to move through.
- I got Andy’s two new records yesterday.
That explains the massive glut of new stuff:
- The Cardigans on KCRW, 18 Jun 1996.
- The Cardigans in Malmö, Sweden, 19 Mar 2006.
- R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People
- R.E.M.’s Monster
- Green
- Ryan Adams’s 29
- Ryan Adams’s Rock N Roll
- Andrew Osenga’s The Morning
- Andrew Osenga’s Photographs, remastered by Jars of Clay’s Matt Odmark.
Told you that was a lot of music. I’ve even given all of it a good, strong listen already.
Back to last week, which proved to be a downer:
- Beck Interview/Concert at WXRK-FM [New York, NY, USA] on 28 Aug 1996. As I noted, it’s just a decade old. Three stars.
- Mindy Smith at the Paste Festival [Atlanta, GA, USA] on 23 Oct 2005. Meh. Three stars.
- Over the Rhine at the Paste Festival [Atlanta, GA, USA] on 22 Oct 2005. Not a great recording, really. “Crazy”, “Looking Forward”, and “Spark” are good despite the three-and-a-half star recording.
- The Bedhead Compilation of Ryan Adams live bootlegs, Volumes 1-3. I was meh on it, but it’s grown on me. I’m calling it four stars on the whole at the end of the day.
- Sufjan Stevens [Los Angeles, CA, USA] on 16 Jul 2005. :yawn: For every awesome Sufjan bootleg I get, I get a crappy one. The sound isn’t good, and that’s not just the bootleg—the venue’s sound seemed sub-standard, as normally-good harmonies weren’t. Disappointing. Three stars.
Sun 28 May 2006
links for 2006-05-28
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As I lean more towards again working for Blood:Water Mission in this year’s Blogathon, this is well-timed to provide me some source material. I admit that my knowledge is barely thumbnail, but doing some early reading can keep me more topically focused t
Sat 27 May 2006
links for 2006-05-27
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You learn something every day.
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From my house to the hotel on Sunday.
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Hotel to the Jubilee City Fest.
Fri 26 May 2006
“It’s like a sentient fireworks show.”
Brad pointed to Websites as graphs and wanted to know how I’d describe its processing of IJSM.org:
Watching that grow as it spidered ijsm.org was a wholly organic experience. Quite … weirdly awesome. It’s like a sentient fireworks show.
That was simultaneously awesome and creepy. Now I think that Alex and John and Keir need to give this a try.
Thu 25 May 2006
Geof’s New Music: 21-27 May 2006
Wow, I’m incredibly tardy in getting this out, aren’t I? I’ve kept finding reasons to put it off. Ah me. Part of it is that I have been … unenthusiastic about the choices I made for this week.
- Beck Interview/Concert at WXRK-FM [New York, NY, USA] on 28 Aug 1996.
- Mindy Smith at the Paste Festival [Atlanta, GA, USA] on 23 Oct 2005.
- Over the Rhine at the Paste Festival [Atlanta, GA, USA] on 22 Oct 2005.
- The Bedhead Compilation of Ryan Adams live bootlegs, Volumes 1-3.
- Sufjan Stevens [Los Angeles, CA, USA] on 16 Jul 2005.
Suffice it to say that none of them have blown me away: the Beck stuff is half-interview and a decade old; the Paste recordings are merely passable audience jobs, the Ryan stuff is just too new to me and too hard to relate to so far [though it's growing on me], and the Sufjan recording is both only a fair audience recording and, seemingly, on another bad night for the venue’s sound. A lot of flat notes from his backup singers.
Anyhow, let’s go to what I spent two whole weeks listening to, because I feel way better about this:
- Bruce Springsteen’s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. At first blush, I was feeling like this would be a 3.5-star album for me, because I didn’t feel like anything would merit five stars. Well, that changed as the two weeks went along: “O Mary Don’t You Weep”, “John Henry”, “Erie Canal”, and “My Oklahoma Home” are favorites. I’m giving this four-and-a-half stars.
- Death Cab for Cutie’s Plans. I was prepared to not like DCfC. I was prepared to think that I was too old to be listening to it. I was wrong. The only track that leaves me “meh” is “Different Names for the Same Thing”, just because the phrasing of the vocals is … awkward. I love “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” and “Your Heart Is an Empty Room”. Four stars.
- Ryan Adams’s Love Is Hell. Oh, Ryan. Many folks hate on you, but I don’t. I have more of your music on tap for next week, too! Anyhow: “This House Is Not for Sale”, “Anybody Wanna Take Me Home”, “Love Is Hell”, “City Rain, City Streets”, “I See Monsters”, and “English Girls Approximately”—as I understand it, a favorite of Scott’s—all get five stars from me. The disc as a whole gets four-and-a-half stars.
- Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia. I’m not as enthusiastic about this as I am any of Ryan’s solo stuff [although I love Caitlin Cary's voice, and I think I'll be getting some Tres Chicas soon], but it’s still got some good stuff. I liked “Reasons to Lie”, “Sit & Listen to the Rain”, “My Hometown”, and “Easy Hearts” very much. Four stars.
June Itinerary Confirmed
Well, I now have my itinerary confirmed:
- Friday, 2 Jun 2006: HEM and Over the Rhine at the Exit/In, Nashville, TN. Stephen will be riding up with me for the show, and Brandi, Trey, Andrew, and Alison may end up coming. We’ll have to see.
- Saturday, 3 Jun 2006: HEM and Over the Rhine at the Variety Playhouse, Atlanta, GA. Some may say that it’s silly to see the same two artists back-to-back; I say that it’s a rare opportunity. Combine that with the fact that I’ll not only get to stay with Jeff and Adriene and get to see Jason, and it seems like a good idea; given that Jeff is who hooked me on OtR in the first place, it’s a necessity. I have warned Adriene that I may spontaneously cry and hug Jeff before, during, and after the show.
- Sunday, 4 Jun 2006: Caedmon’s Call at Church of the Apostles, Atlanta, GA. We hadn’t planned on this show happening, but when Jeff saw it on the schedule, he said, “Dude! You have to come with us!” I think he’s just using me for my ability to get guestlisted.
[It's okay.] - Monday, 5 Jun 2006: Over the Rhine and HEM at the Vistulite Theatre in Charlotte, NC. This is the show I had been planning to see for about two months, really. Why this show? It gave me a ready excuse to visit Brandon and Sarah, with hopes for seeing Mike and Kari as well. We’ll all four be going, as will Andrea. It’s me and my Carolina crew! [Even if they all hate Duke.]
Some call it obssession. I call it commitment. I’ll drive home on Tuesday and be back at work on Wednesday the 7th. My boss is out tomorrow through next week, so I will be looking forward to a little time away.
Because I Clearly Needed Another Hobby
As the summer has arrived, the only new shows I’ll be watching on TV are Rescue Me and Big Brother 7. As I’m almost done with my quest to watch every Law & Order episode ever—I’ve got only four left that I can’t confirm I’ve watched, and I’m 90% sure I’ve seen three of them—I’m turning my attention to Cheers, a staple of my childhood. Mind you, I was far too young to pick up on any of the sexual innuendo at the time, but I have an appreciation for it now. Because I’m a nerd, I’m tracking it, but I’m also taking a little time to write up a brief recap and review each episode on the TV IV. My first attempt is for Season Two’s “Personal Business”.
The only issue with doing this is that I either have to watch the episode twice or watch it once and pause every so often to write a few sentences. But I hope that my contributions to TV IV add value. [Stephen is either looking at the screen and wishing that he had the time do to this or wondering what he has to do to snap me out of this.]
Behold King Eli!
Eli seriously needs a full-time photographer following him around at all times. It’s like my own personal version of CuteOverload, but with Eli instead of a bunch of foofy animals. Instead, we just have Misty’s regular photo postings.
Sample Andrew Osenga’s Music
I’ve written about my friend Andy Osenga before [many times]. Andy’s got a new album coming out quite soon, and he’s got a free and legal MP3 he’s putting out there for people to grab.
Check it out. Look into those haunting eyes and tell me that you won’t.
links for 2006-05-25
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I mean … yeah. I love the Granades. I love Misty. :sniffle:
Wed 24 May 2006
Better Than We Know Ourselves
Pitchfork has a great piece about the present state of music recommendation services. I geek out over this stuff.
The Holsapple Tempts Me
I wasn’t going to make the trip down to Jubilee City Fest to see Caedmon’s Call play some crappy festival … until Andrew told me that Josh Moore can’t make the show this weekend and Randy Holsapple, former keyboardist for CC, is going to fill in for this date. How can I resist that opportunity? I haven’t seen Randy play a Hammond B3 for CC since 1998 [at my very first CC show ever].
This means that I’ll see CC two times in a week [they play in Atlanta the next Sunday night; since I'll already be in town, I'm going]. I haven’t seen them since last September in Maryland. Too long.
Yes, I know, I’m insane. Now to find a hotel, because I’m staying the night before driving back…
links for 2006-05-24
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For when I finally do a home theater downstairs.
Tue 23 May 2006
Going Off Half-Cocked
Remember when I dissed Flagrant for wanting out of MusicBrainz? Turns out it was a hoax.
Like Reagan said: Trust, but verify. [The sound you just heard was the other two males in my nuclear family geeking out because I brought up the 40th President.]
The great thing about Weblogs? You can make the retraction just as loud as the original salvo. Do you see newspapers doing that? No. They “regret the error”. Heh.
Deconstructing the FeedLounge Downtime
If this were Slashdot, I’d file this under the so-meta-it-hurts department. It’s not, though. It’s IJSM.org, which means that the audience is smaller, “FR1ST P50T!” is a rarity, and Natalie Portman isn’t pouring hot grits down anyone’s pants. [See? Even my Slashdot jokes are three years old.]
Anyhow, so FeedLounge had some downtime, related to a minor oversight that ended up being a colossal Charlie-Foxtrot: Alex’s server was, for a bunch of understandable but inexcusable reasons, the single-point-of failure for DNS authority for FeedLounge.com. When Alex’s server burned up, it all went to shit—FeedLounge the server was running fine, but no one could reach it. The DNS system was unable to route around the damage because there was a single point of failure.
I think Alex is pretty clear, in retrospect, that he didn’t address this well enough the first time, so he did, as he termed it, an “O’Grady style Q&A” to answer the questions regarding FeedLounge’s outage. I want to slice-and-dice to the relevant parts:
Why didn’t you also check this for feedlounge.com?
Unfortunately, the answer is really simple - we forgot. We moved the feedlounge.com web site to a dedicated server in a data center in New Jersey last summer around the same time we move the ‘Lounge onto our big servers in our rack space in San Francisco.
Since feedlounge.com was no longer on boxes at the Austin data center, we didn’t think to check the DNS records for feedlounge.com.
Do you now feel that was monumentally stupid?
Um, yeah. And then some.
Are you saying that if this had happened a week ago, it wouldn’t have caused any trouble?
Most likely, yes. We’d have replaced the fried box just like we’ve done, but the backup DNS servers would have shouldered the load while we did so.
Sounds like you guys should have paid more attention to this.
Agreed. Lesson learned - the hard way.
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So what do you do now?
Besides offering an apology to our users, there isn’t much we can do. We have to wait for the changes we’ve already made to take effect.
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I’m not satisfied or happy about this.
Trust me, we’re not either.
Ok, now what?
It was a bad day for FeedLounge. With apologies to our users, we fix the problem and move forward. As we do, we’ll continue to work hard to make FeedLounge as reliable as possible and continue building the features our users are asking for.
That’s really all they can do. The guys just learned a painful—and, probably, unprofitable—lesson. We’re at the “mistakes were made” portion of the program. As a user of the system, it’s easy for me to be upset—and yes, I was inconvenienced by this. But I talked to Alex (and some to Scott) while it was on-going, and so I knew what the problems were and that it would be a pain to fix them. DNS is a royal pain in my ass, and downtime is, too.
While there’s room to be disappointed in the early responses given—telling users to hack their DNS isn’t a good solution; I’m reasonably handy with computers, and I didn’t know how to do it straight off—those are simply the responses that you unthinkingly give when you’re reacting rather than acting. To be fair to the guys, they had a lot of reacting to do—”I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B!” Sometimes you have to do what Deke Slayton—at least I think it was him—referred to as “the JC maneuver”: “Take your hands off the controls and put it in the hands of a su-per-nat-ur-al pow-er.”
Some days, you’re the cow, and some days, you’re the pasture. FeedLounge was definitely the pasture recently, but remember … fertilized pasture grows really good grass.
Matt Haughey: True Geek
Take a Macbook. Add MacSaber. Shake well.
Kudos, Matt. Wish I’d had the chutzpah to ping you for an hour of your time over beers when I was last in Portland.
Software Recently Banished from My Mac for Killing Its Performance
- BOINC Manager just kept death-spiraling and causing regular CPU spikes when it should have been laying dormant, waiting for idle time. My CPU would go to 100% every three or four seconds. I’ll keep running BOINC at the office because I believe in it, but … damn.
- TiVo Desktop proved to be too much of a resource hog for as little utility as I got out of it. Maybe I’ll re-install it when TiVo Desktop for the Mac hits v2.0, but … probably not.
Uninstalling TiVo Desktop for the Mac proved a little confusing, but Google helped me to find out how: go to System Preferences, stop the process, bring up Finder, run a search, and trash everything. Darn non-disk-image apps.
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