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I've received two "high CPU" notices from my host about the CPU usage of my search and comments CGI scripts. Before the second, I tried to obfuscate the name of the comments CGI a little, and it didn't help. Since I'm hosting my blog and MHS on the same server, something's gotta give. I doubt the spammers are hitting that site. So for the time being I've disabled comments and search on this blog until a figure a way around this. I'm not sure whether checking out MT's dynamic publishing is worth the work versus considering a move to WordPress. Email me if you have comments.

We're having another boy! He's due May 9th. We had a nice 30-minute ultrasound visit with him yesterday.

I've been very busy at work for the last month plus bringing up a cluster of two large Opteron-based servers running VI3 Enterprise. It's my first experience with the high-availability features of the VMware ESX platform. It's very nice! I've implemented a clustered iSCSI target implementation using NetApp FAS3020's to serve as the shared storage. Now that everything's up and integrated, it's working quite well. Pretty soon I'll be ready to start moving real workload to the cluster. I would work on VMware solutions full-time if I could; that's how good that software is.

I made the playoffs in the BDFL for the first time this year, but I didn't get past the first round. Now that I've had a taste of the postseason, I want more!

Thinking about doing something different with the blog in the new year. We'll see!

Melissa and I had a great time going to see the Bills beat the Vikings yesterday.

Traffic in the area of Ralph Wilson Stadium was backed up, but no worse than I thought it'd be. We were in the thick of it for about 20-30 minutes and then parked in one of the outer lots off Abbott Road. I wasn't thrilled by the idea of buying a window sticker for $7 or any of the other memorabilia I saw, so we headed into the Stadium about an hour before kickoff. That gave us time to get some food, find our seats, and settle in. We were pretty worried about both the tempature and the chance for rain; neither turned out to be a factor. Temps were in the low 60s, there was no rain, and the wind swirled around a bit. Great football weather.

Our seats turned out to be great. They were in the front row of section 200, nearly lined up with the goalposts. We had a great view of everything but the Jumbotron -- it was behind us. I brought some binoculars with me, and they were a great help when play was at the other end of the field. The guys were plenty close when on our side. I didn't mind seeing the game from that perspective; I liked seeing the formations head-on.

And the game? Great. Willis McGahee's first TD of the season came in the end zone closest to us. We knew it would be a low-scoring game, but I didn't think the Bills would let the Vikings come back late in the game. They kept it together and got a little bit of luck as well. One thing I was proud of was that the stadium got very noisy (I helped) every time the Vikings offense had the ball; I have to think that had an effect. Seeing the game in person reminded me that these guys are still human, and that media coverage of NFL games tends to over-amplify both the game and the players. But it's all in good fun.

Thanks again to Melissa (I love you!) for treating me to a great early birthday present!

Old camera: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P51
New camera: Canon PowerShot A530
Old camcorder: Sony Hi8 CCD-TRV66
New camcorder: Canon MiniDV Elura 100

Thanks to Oddsock for updating his excellent streaming DSP Oddcast to support foobar2000 0.9.x. I certainly wasn't one of the ones bugging him about it, but now that it's here I'm playing with it. This was a great time to do so, as FB2K 0.9.4 came out recently. And I've been thinking about changing around the ICYG back-end.

I've got a decent FB2K/Continuator/Oddcast chain going, with 44.1kHz Stereo Ogg Vorbis streams of Q0 and Q8 (in-home only) and a 32kHz Stereo 64kbps CBR MP3 stream. I've confirmed that FB2K 0.9.4 now supports FLAC streams; however, in my limited testing so far I've found that Icecast develops CPU usage problems when dealing out a FLAC stream. I'm eager to see if I can serve one out within the house stably, but for listening purposes the Q8 Vorbis stream is just fine.

I've got an instance of Winamp and Eric Milles' Remote Speakers Output plugin that I've got going 24/7 listening to that Q8 stream and pumping it to the Airport Express attached to our stereo. Hi-def ICYG in the living room is a nice thing to have! And Ryan likes it when he hears the station IDs he recorded over 2 years ago come on...

I moved the main ICYG streamer over to FB2K 0.9.4/Oddcast 3.1.15 the other day. I'm shutting down the old website. The new player is populating both last.fm and foosic with playback info; they're both neat services. Since the links on the old website weren't generating sales, it seemed pointless to maintain the site. I'm generating unique-artist playlists every 4 hours now; I'll probably increase the playlist duration as time goes on. This thing is pretty much vanity at this point, but I'll continue to keep streaming. I like tuning in the mix and continuing to test the boundaries of the software.

It was great to have another Locke episode on "Lost" last night. He's one of my favorite characters. The "sweat house" scene with his vision of Boone was well-produced. It's a shame we're only going to get three more new episodes until January.

Ryan has one of these guitars. After a few months of flat-out strumming, he's started to do some rough fretting, harmonics, and is experimenting with feedback. With the built-in amp behind the strings, that'll happen. ;)