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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: July 2008

  • Small Tweaks, Big Boost

    I noticed Thursday evening, while working on the two mixes, that this site was loading very slowly. I removed some plugins and dynamically generated content to compensate but that only made things tolerable instead of actually peppy.

    This morning the page load timed out just trying to get to the WordPress “dashboard,” so I dug in deeper and researched the problem. Restarting Apache (something I should’ve done Thursday night as soon as I noticed the problem) made a night-and-day difference in performance. Based on my research I’ve also tuned Apache’s configuration to better utilize timeout values and keep-alives. As a brute-force measure I’m also restarting Apache every week; that should clear out a lot of cruft and clutter in processes and memory that accumulates and bogs the system down.

    A server admin’s work is never done… and that’s just the way I like it. Good for you, eh?

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week Six

    This week’s musical selection is one of those acts that most people think peaked and went away within a few short years back in the ’80s. While the case could be made that they’re not as commercially successful in the “hit records” sense nowadays, they’re still packing ’em in on the dance floors, not to mention collaborating with musical stars both new and old.

    Coming up with an approach to the Pet Shop Boys mix stymied me for days. This evening I had almost settled on starting with the single version of “Left To My Own Devices” from 1988 when I realized that the song is twenty years old and counts among their early material. That’s when I decided to look at what albums came out when, and the solution finally presented itself as I noticed that Please, Bilingual and Fundamental are spaced at a ten year interval. (What? Bilingual is twelve years old now? That can’t be right…)

    Please enjoy, in chronological order, the songs “Tonight Is Forever,” “Up Against It” and “Integral.”

    That last track is a bit sociopolitical in lyrical tone, which leads rather neatly into our next musical selection. Join us for a trip Down Under next week…

  • Too Too Too Too

    This isn’t part of anything, nor is it meant to have meaning, nor does it flow very well in a musical fashion. I’m inflicting it upon the world anyway, at least the part of the world curious enough to give it a listen.

    I was walking to the MAX station after work and The Church’s “Much Too Much” came on, followed by Genesis’ “Feeding the Fire,” which includes the lyrics, “Well I have seen you stung by poisonous flies / And you suffer much too much from their bites.” I realized that not only was that a nifty coincidence born of random song selections, but I happen to have a string of songs with a similar, connectable title scheme.

    I give you, therefore, a mix which could be titled “Much Too Much Too Many Too Many Too Many Too Many People.” (I tacked the Pet Shop Boys track on because… well, the Genesis track is painfully ’70s. Trust me. I’d rather end on a high note than leave the title theme unbroken.)

    Don’t worry. The Project entry is in the works even as I take a break to type this up…

  • Think of it as a compromise on NaNoWriMo.

    In a flash of crazed, half-asleep inspiration, my next ambitious project just came to mind. It pushes me in a desirable direction, it’s a bit “multimedia” even though that buzzword went out of style ages ago, and I’ll have to work just that much harder to pull it off versus the effort I’m putting into my Summer Music Project. One should challenge oneself, I’ve been told.

    So here’s the idea: What if I wrote a serialized story that came with its own soundtrack?

    To pull this off I’ll have to put together more prep work than I’ve done for the Summer Project. I’ll need a plot outline and a list of appropriate songs. At least I won’t need any additional hardware. I might try some new software, though.

    Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’ll give up on this idea like I’ve done with so many others in my life. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll pull this off and build up the confidence to try something bigger…

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week Five

    Jon Crosby seems to be a guy who just likes noodling around musically. I’m not too sure about the direction he’s going lately, but I like a lot of the material he released under the guise of VAST. Please enjoy a song with the name “Song Without A Name,” a song I sort of panned in my review back when Nude came out named “Don’t Take Your Love Away,” and the song which got me hooked on VAST back when I was experimenting with MP3 downloading way back in the day named “Touched.”

    We’re about one third of the way through the project, my friends. Our next outing will once again send us back to the UK for a date with one of the most successful pop duos around.

  • One Smooth and One Rough Upgrade

    WordPress 2.6? No problem. Upgraded in two minutes, everything worked perfectly afterward.

    Mandigo 1.35? Problem. It forgot all of my settings. All. I managed to get things looking more-or-less the way I want them, but I really wish I’d noted some of the custom color selections I’d set. Also, the “TMTT” drop-down menu doesn’t work.

    Not that anybody actually reads the Thumbnail Theater thing, but still. Such is life in the fast lane.

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