Got back from LEGO World today, after being buffeted by thousands of people a day. Since mere words are unable to describe that much brick, I present pictures - nearly two hundred of them, on my Brickshelf account.
There were a lot of BIONICLE displays, including a display that included most sets that have been released to date. Here are a few thumbnails (click for bigger pictures); view my main Brickshelf account for more.
As you may have heard, today's the 50th Birthday of the LEGO Brick. There are some fun things going on today, thought I'd share and point some out. A brass band singing "Is that my baby" just walked through the office. The tuba player had to duck to avoid the low-hanging ceiling in some places. Google has a header made from LEGO bricks today, even including a minifig. Traffic to LEGO.com is expected to spike. Various fun things are planned for different locations, or so I've read in different ne
I keep an eye on the server stats - how many people visit per day and month, how many hits we get, how many page views, how much bandwidth is sent out per day, and so on. For the most part, it's fairly consistent over the last year, with peaks and valleys that correspond to new products and announcements or server issues, respectively. With last week's server problems, the stats took a noticeable trip south.
But now that everything's been fixed (or so I believe at this point), we're actually
Well, it’s officially announced: I’m the new webmaster for BIONICLE.com and BIONICLEstory.com. Specifically, my job title is “Internet Content Manager” for Product Group 3. That means in addition to BIONICLE, I’m also ultimately responsible for the LEGO Racers and LEGO Technic web sites. But there are others working on those sites, which takes a load off me – at least to start.
The new job involves much travel. I’m currently in Denmark, and will be attending meetings in Copenhagen and Connect
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
How embarrassing.
I downloaded the Bionicle Heroes demo yesterday, and gave it a whirl. I'd had the chance to test-drive it during development a few weeks ago, and probably made the developers nervous because of how poorly I did. This time I did a bit better, it took a few tries to get good at it, but I did manage to get to the end.
My 12-year-old son watched me for two minutes, and whizzed through the entire thing his first try, in about half the time of my final attempt.
Fine, ya li'l
It was a dark and stormy night. The laptop slammed. A "beep" rang out. The printer screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the monitor!
Too much Snoopy.
How 'bout, "It was the best of weekends, it was the worst of weekends"? Yeah, that's better. Although I'm wary of segues from Schultz to Dickens... it cheapens Schultz.
The long weekend was productive in a lot of ways. We had a kids birthday, which was fun (and yes, he got a LEGO set), but more importantly, I got a few things done
Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions in my PM box.
Q. When will BIONICLEstory.com be updated?
A. Every two weeks.
Q. When will the 7th Mahri game come out?
A. By the end of October.
Q. Somebody stole my MOC and put it on the BIONICLE.com gallery! Fix it!
A. Can't, not my department. I'm working on a longer blog entry to more fully explain this.
Q. Tell us about the 2008 stuff!
A. Sorry, can't talk about upcoming releases.
Q. What's your favorite color?
A. G
Nothing exciting, but I figured it was time to give you an update on work-type stuff.
I just finished launching all the local sites (11 languages), after having launched US, UK, and Germany in July. Now I can concentrate on getting the game out there. It's in testing right now, and although I don't think it'll be ready for an August release, it should come in early September. The good news, though, is it WILL be released in all languages - either simultaneously, or right after the US version
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.
One of the things I want to spend my new "free" time on is writing. Those familiar with the ol' BinkBlog will remember I've been doing some writing lately. And since "starving writer" isn't a vocation that particularly interests me, I'm going to try to move right into the "makin' a bathtub full of money writer" stage.
See, your average novel writer gets beer money and invitations to book signings at Borders, but not much more. Short story writers, not even as much as that. The big money, from
Woke up this morning to read on CNN about a plot to blow up airplanes leaving London Heathrow for the US. Like one of the flights I was on a couple of weeks ago. Sends chills down the spine. I feel fortunate, seeing pictures of the massively long queues in Heathrow, and hearing of five hour delays and things like that.
Just kinda makes you think. I'm glad they caught this one before anyone was able to blow up a plane over the Atlantic.
OK, it's a new day, and maybe - just maybe - I can write without being too fuzzy.
One exciting opportunity I've had recently is to become involved with LEGOFan.org, which is a portal site that was started by Jake McKee, former LEGO community liaison. It's been a bit neglected, and I have been able to go in and migrate the content to a new server, set up new forum software, and so on. The switchover isn't complete yet (there was a DNS mixup, it should've been finished today but it's not), so y
The forums are back online.
Here's the scoop. Apparently, the server we were on was having hardware issues. It kept eating database entries, so randomly topics or messages or members or posts were disappearing. Then, the blogs started to not show up, and longer posts. And then everything went kablooey.
Well, it took some time to get through to our hosting company, and then it took some more time for them to narrow things down, and then it took time to get back to us, and then it took time
It's been an eventful few days around the Bink househould. On Saturday, my wife's brother found a lone Wii console for sale, so he picked it up for us. We met up with him, paid him for it, and got it home and plugged it in. The boys in the household have spent some time bowling, golfing, playing baseball and tennis. And getting sore shoulders (well, at least mine are sore).
All that, and Harry Potter is in the house. A cute little box from Amazon showed up on the doorstep on Saturday, printed
Anybody noticing my new avatar may be wondering what that's about...
In short form: I got a wild hair.
Longer form: The new season of Battlestar Galactica is coming up in early October, and I'm getting ready to see what they're gonna do to all of the characters. I've always had a soft spot for Gaius Baltar, that Cylon-lovin', sex-addled, ADHD-sufferin', surrender-monkey genuis president of the Thirteen Colonies.
And let's face it, anything is better than the "leadership" afflicting
Man, what a tough week.
I'm sure you don't want to hear a sob story - after all, I work for LEGO! How hard could that possibly be? But let's just say a combination of jet lag, tons of work, working outside of the office for several weeks, and an intense 2-day marketing meeting in Copenhagen have taken their toll. So even though I was supposed to visit Skærbæk for an AFOL event this weekend, I stayed in Billund instead, recuperating.
And doing laundry. Very important, that.
Anyway, even
OK, so for all you asking about the song for 2009... it looks like my agitation is successful! The song will be available on BIONICLE.com as both a download and as a music video, starting in August. Not sure of the exact date, but shooting for early August.
This is as confirmed as I can get it. I watched the video, the song's good and the video is neat. And before you ask (because somebody will, even though I'm saying this), no, it won't go online any earlier, no, I can't give sneak previews.
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
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
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.
Ever since I stopped being a LEGO Ambassador, I've found my email box is much more manageable. Don't know if it was really that busy, but it sure seems like there's less email coming my way.
BTW, this is not a request for more email... I still get several hundred pieces a day (mostly spam), and I like not having to hose out my mailbox every fifteen minutes.
And yes, theoretically, that should give me time to get to work on the skins and such, but it never seems to work that way...
Jeez, the last week has been harsh. The last time I wrote that I thought it was fixed, the site went down for basically 2 days. So I'm gonna say it's completely broken, life will never be the same, this sucks, and so on.
So it'll never be fixed, I make no guarantees to uptime. Pfeh.
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.
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