A friend of mine recently spent a week in Billund working on yet another top-secret project, and told me that during his stay they visited the not-yet-completed LEGO Museum near Legoland Billund. It's apparently got a lot of cool stuff, but the biggest surprise was that they have an entire fan section, including videos. Specifically, at least one video, written and voiced by yours truly. So my melodious voice is apparently heard in the museum.
Mega coolness.
Lugnet thread describing the mu
Been sick again. It's funny how my body goes icky for a couple of days at a time, then a switch gets thrown and I feel OK again. Weird.
Better now than in two weeks when I'm on vacation. That's what I keep telling myself.
I've started to take writing more seriously, and have entered a regional writing competition. The prize is only $300, and it won't be announced until August, but it's a start. Writing is where I've decided I want to spend my effort, since time is a river and it ain't getting any deeper for me - although it seems to run faster these days.
Up to now, I've been writing some fanfics and little blog entries, letters to the editor, and so on. No, I won't link, but it's absurdly simple to find them.
So my famous procrastination kicked in, as I'm supposed to be working on LEGOFan, and for the last couple of nights I've been slaving away on a relatively simple MOC. I'm surprised nobody's done this one before.
Actually, I was surfing images on Google, looking for Stargate SG-1 replicators (which I'm gonna build one of these days), and ran across an image from an old movie that came out when I was 4 years old. The image is fairly iconic, so I'm thinking most people here should get it.
Whe
Looks like my social indignation found a minor outlet in the local newspaper... my letter to the editor was published in The Oregonian this morning. Here's a link (it's the second one on the page).
Now all I have to do is go from letter to the editor to published scriptwriter... then I'll be happy.
Because my technical ponderings of the intricacies of maintaining a server are so obscure, I thought I'd try a different method to describe this often convoluted process. Plus, it gives me a chance to do some pretentious creative writing, which is always fun. So here's an intro and description of recent server adjustments as told in Ye Olde Binkyisms. BTW, I didn't invent "Lord Survurlode" but he's a great villain... I'm sure we'll see more of him in stories as time goes on.
Welcome to The
So I'm watching the server, trying to see why it keeps crawling into its own bellybutton, and notice that it's not always the mySQL processes that lock up. Even when there are no DB threads running, the server load can hit 80, 90, 100+... when the optimum is 5 or under (and the forums shut off at 15). When I kill the http daemon (Apache), the load plummets.
Hmm.
Most of the optimization I've done involves mySQL tweaks. But that's not all of it. This has puzzled me for a while. Now, I'm not
Went to a job interview last Friday, for a "startup" that's been going for a couple of years already. They need a webmaster, somebody to do everything from site architecture to web app development to blog setup and maintenance to UI design. Sounds exactly like what I do, so I'm hopeful that I'll get a call this week. They do internet security work - more than that I can't say. Mostly because I don't know much more than that.
Turns out a lot of the skills they're looking for are things I've le
Fluorescent lights in the cramped break room banished all shadows from the stained linoleum counter, and cast the ancient microwave into stark contrast with beige cabinets above. The smell of cheap coffee brewing in long-unwashed filters was slightly nauseating, but I masked it by dumping a packet of hot chocolate into the three-quarters filled paper cup. Light brown powder shimmered on top of the black sea of coffee, forming islands and archipeligos and peninsulas. Surface tension held the powd
At work today, one of the other programmers found where Postgres' "analyze table" function will rebuild table indexes, speeding things up a lot. I'm using something similar for BZP's database, but not the exact same thing. So I added the mySQL "analyze table" function to my DB cleaner and ran it, and it seems to have sped things up a bit. I've just finished, so I'll give it a few days to really kick in. Hopefully this will help with the server latency issues.
It's been a week since BrickFest ended, and I think I'm finally caught up on sleep. Now my two big priorities are BZP and LEGOFan.
But first, a digression. A few weeks ago, I got the Windows Vista upgrade that I was promised when I bought my new computer last November, so I installed it. Bad move. Half my apps (including the newly-purchased Halo, as well as iTunes) stopped working. Grrrr. So I decided to use the 3 DVD backup they'd forced me to make in order to get my system back to normal. I
As posted on Lugnet earlier today...
It's Tuesday. I think. That means BrickFest 2007 must be complete. I'm pretty sure, through the lack of sleep haze. And before the glow fades (or consciousness fully returns), I'd like to present a recap of the event.
First, some numbers.
Date: March 30 through April 1, 2007
Convention Attendees: 214
Location: 45°31' North, -122°39' West
Public expo: 5 hours (on the auspicious first of April)
Public expo attendees: 2,800+
Estimated average hours
So you always wondered what some of us looked like, didn't you? I have a few pictures.
Kopaka's Ice Engineering, Omicron, Roa McToa, Dr. Who, Binkmeister
Scary Omi!
Another better pic of KIE, Omi, and Roa McToa
One of the many excellent MOCs brought by Roa
Birds-eye view of part of the rest of the exhibit
More pictures will be available here (after moderation).
Soooo tired...
Nearly midnight Saturday, and it's been another 16-hour-day at the fest. Been hanging with Omi, Makaru, Roa McToa, and of course KIE, and Shadrahk showed up today with his dad (sorry, don't know your screen handle). It's been busy, but pretty fun, although it's a lot of work to get these things going and keep 'em going. So far nothing major has disrupted the flow.
Thursday night we did initial setup, and got things well under way. We had a pizza party (Pizza Schmizza) for ab
It's almost here.
Today's setup day at the Oregon Convention Center. I'm about to scoot out of work and head down to unload a bunch of stuff from the wife's van, then bop back home to pick up more boxes that just arrived from LEGO today. Apparently there's a big mysterious black box on the porch, can't wait to see what that is. We're expecting door prize stuff from TLG, so that should be it.
The last couple of weeks have been hectic, trying to get everything done and ready for the fest. La
Posting for my records mostly, but you might be interested...
The server's been running like a one-legged dispeptic sloth that's been dead for a month. It's been a source of much frustration - it vexed me mightily. So tonight I did one of my bi-weekly database backups, and checked around to make sure the files were all where they were supposed to be.
They weren't.
Not sure if this is the root cause of the server slowing down, but I discovered that the preferences file for the database w
I had so much planned out for this weekend, too... but I lost most of it by being flat on my back with snotrags stuffed up my snout. Indelicate, yet annoyingly accurate. Only last night about 10 o'clock did the fever break and my brain returned to whatever semblance of normal it ever reaches.
And it's not so much being achy and snotty and generally miserable as knowing I've lost a full day of billable work (as a contractor, I don't get paid sick days). That hurt. Fortunately, the week before
OK, now that my red building is done, and I've gotten my BZP engraved bricks, yet another big milestone in one of my many projects has come to fruition. After many, many weeks of being offline, LEGOFan.org is finally back online. It's just a placeholder, but there'll be something new coming soon.
Oh, and I had a great teleconference with the LEGO Brand Retail people about BrickFest, there's going to be some awesome deals on Friday night of the convention. I'm saving my pennies, and anyone els
Pick-A-Brick is our friend.
I'm an excellent procrastinator. Over the last month or so, I've been surreptitiously working on an actual physical brick MOC, when I should've been doing other things. You can tell me if it was worth it.
The design itself isn't really noteworthy, except maybe for the half-plate offset of the tiles to give it a layered look. What really catches the eye is the sheer amount of dark red 1x4 tiles. Since I lack imagination or originality, I call it BinkTower.
(
One of my many projects is moving closer to fruition. A project that I think will interest many BZP'ers... and this is so neat I can't keep it to myself, so I'll let just one of the kittens out of the bag (there are more surprises later). Let's just say you'll have a chance to obtain one of these at some point soon...
Here's another look
Again, mostly just a note for me... optimized the database, did the whole thing. The server had been bogged down all morning. Ran the entire suite of optimization commands I had, and it seems to be cruising along better.
Wonder if I can automate it...
UPDATE: See bottom for newest pic.
I rebuilt it, biggerer, betterer, strongerer...
I figure I can get another one and a half stories done with the red tiles I've got. I really should get back to actual real work one of these days...
When there's work to be done, you can be certain the Binkman is strenuously looking for ways to avoid it. There are times when I get overwhelmed with all the stuff I think I have to get done, and those are the times I'm most likely to go off and do something else entirely. For instance, as a writer, I find all sorts of ways to not write. Clean my desk. Build a moc. Watch a Stargate SG-1 rerun. Play with the kids. Shave the cat. Anything to avoid actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
T
