Nothin' to see here, move along. Just optimized the database. I'd like to keep a record of major maintenance, and until I think of a suitable place, you'll just have to suffer my memory loss and scribbles about things like this.
I live by technology, I'm one of those "bleeding-edge" kinda people who loves to dive into the latest and greatest (most of the time). So when I get tangled in tech gone awry, it's always a little bit of a shock.
For the last couple of weeks, I'd wondered why I haven't been hearing from my LEGO contact(s) much. At all, actually. I figured they were ignoring me... wouldn't be the first time. Today, though, I decided to check my ISP's spam catcher, which has a tendency to be greedy and suck in
Even though things seem to be going fairly well, the weekends do tend to bog the server down. I ran a couple of new optimization commands last time, they seemed to help a lot, so rather than run the entire 2+ hours of optimizations, I just ran these three commands, which took about 30 seconds. The server seems to be working OK now, but time will tell - as always.
This is sooooo typical...
I have two equally compelling things that happen at the same time. And yes, I could do both, but it would mean delayed gratification and I'm just not into that. So I'm the donkey stuck between two piles of food.
One the one hand, I've been invited to the LEGO "Toy Fair" preview in New York next month. They'll have events and information and a preview of the 2007 lineup (some of which has leaked already). It's an invitation-only party that I've been invited to for
Last September or so, I exulted that I'd finally found how to fix the server lag problems BZP has been plagued with. Over the last few weeks, regular visitors will have noticed many times when the server wasn't available, or was very very slow. I've been spending quite a few hours on trying to get it fixed, and it seems to have stabilized.
Web logs showed last Monday we had a lot of traffic, I'm not sure exactly why. But it was hanging the web server. I did everything I could to keep it going
A surprise snowstorm hit. I left home this morning with about half an inch on the ground, by the time the train got downtown there was 2 inches. Now it's up to 3, and radar shows several hours of snow to go. Buses and cars were sliding all over the place - it's that fine, powdery stuff that is fun to walk in, but very slippery when compressed.
Getting home's gonna be fun
One of the (many) LEGO activities I am part of includes providing a window display for the local LEGO store. Every couple of months, my local club Greater Portland LEGO Railroaders (GPLR) swaps out a model. The last one was an airport I built. The new one, which we just put in, is a rocket garden with custom LEGO rockets by a couple of club members: Jeremy Rear and Kim Toll.
You can see more pictures on the club's Gallery page. There's a Titan II missile on the launch pad, a Saturn 1B, an
I may not look like I post often, but I'm on the site often during the day, and I'm always working on something. The latest thing is pulling together this BZPower DVD-ROM, which is taking lots of time lately. I'm currently working on getting some "extra" stuff that is either hard to find or just not available anywhere else, to help entice my loyal readers to plunk down their cash. I'll definitely make it worth the money.
As it stands, right now we're looking at getting the master DVD-ROM comp
Well, it looks like my little DVD-ROM sparked a lot of interest, gauging by the responses and polls. Enough so for me to start actually working on producing said disc, and finding some "extra" content for it. Initial indications are very favorable in getting some stuff onto the disc that will be very popular, I think. You may be surprised at how much stuff we have lying around, just begging to be put on this DVD.
Estimated timeframe for having it ready for sale: February 2007. Estimated price
I think this is the longest I've gone between blog postings, oops...
Been busy, real busy. Got myself a new job in early November, been slaving away at that, although last week hasn't been as bad. Worked 77 hours the week before, though.
And there's been a lot of LEGO-related stuff going on too, of course. I have fun pictures of a couple of things.
First, over the last week I've been incrementally backing up the full BZPower machine, and finally downloaded all the relevant content to my
Ever since NW BrickCon, where one of the Dirty Brickster gifts was a modified USB thumb drive embedded into a 2x6 LEGO brick, I've wanted to try playing with something like that. So, with all the good deals on personal electronics last weekend, I picked up a 512MB Flash drive for $14 - heckuva deal. It's pretty tiny, and came with a keychain and carabiner which I'm not going to use. The thumb drive itself, when removed from the external plastic case, was just a tad too big to slide into a hollow
Well, I hope you'll all forgive my lack of posting this week... but I've received my review copy of Bionicle Heroes and my time has been sucked into the game. It's a fairly big game, so it'll take a while to review, but I hope to have a comprehensive review by early next week.
In the meantime, if you're so inclined, you can always buy it yourself. It's definitely worth the price.
As I'd thought, last week's new job is taking a lot of time. I'm riding the train to and from work, with a one-mile walk to and from the train station every day. I could drive, but rush hour traffic is a bugger, and I get a free monthly transit pass from the company. So even if it takes an hour each way instead of half an hour, I'm saving significant amounts of gas money, and getting some exercise on top of that. So I guess it's worth the inconvenience. I still get home at 5 p.m. or so, which gi
I start a new job next Monday. It's a 3-month contract gig, boring yet well-paying, that may be extended in February '07. It's a little nerve-wracking going to a job where I don't know what's going to be happening in a few months, but now is a very good time for me to get the heck outta where I've been working for the last 5 years. And the job market for what I do is looking up, so I'm not too worried.
My new job probably won't allow me the latitude to go onto BZP during the day, as I've had
I did a database backup and optimization today, in the hopes it would alleviate some of the server lag and site busy messages. I did it a little different this time... I think the script that I ran last time didn't run all the way through on the POSTS table, so it didn't go through and really clean things out well enough. I'm hoping that by running the cleanup by hand this time (on that one table) will really make a difference.
If not, then back to square one. Again, for the zillionth time.
For the last several days, one of my MOCs has been getting a lot of feedback from MOCPages. I wasn't sure why, but it's been pretty consistent. Today, I found out why.
Over the last year or so, I've gotten spurts of attention for my LEGO Stargate, usually when one of the Stargate fan sites publishes a link. This time, though, the attention came from pundit site BBSpot. I wouldn't have known about it unless Dimensioneer emailed me with the link. Looks like my Stargate is in the Daily Links lis
If you were on BZP earlier today, you probably noticed it was unavailable for a few hours, off and on. I'm still not sure why, but I took it offline several times to try to optimize the database. I finally ended up flushing everything, and I hope that did the trick. Other than that, not sure why it was lagging so badly.
It's days like this that make me want to find somebody else to babysit this server...
Boy, was that a long weekend!
Drove up to Seattle on Friday, leaving at 6:30 a.m. with my kids and friend Bob Kojima, and we made excellent time to the Seattle Center in the wife's minivan. My other friend Steve was supposed to come up with us, be he decided to drive up the night before. Friday was kind of a slow setup day, and I managed to get my lone moonbase set up without too much trouble. I admit to not helping nearly as much with setup as maybe I should've, but I claim prior exigencies
T minus 3 days to departure for NWBC, and still nowhere near ready.
Building, slowly... I'm not a fast builder. I usually get there, but not quickly. In this case, it's something I've had lying around for about 2 years. I finally found some parts to finish the radio dish I've been working on (courtesy of my new NXT), so I'm reconstructing it. Eventually, it'll go on top of a moonbase module.
Here's a sneak peek of what it looks like now.
Now all I've gotta do is get it installed into
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...
Contrary to what I've been told, employees aren't gardens. If you heap manure on them, you're not gonna get flowers back. It's a pity my boss hasn't realized this.
Having an obsessive-compulsive personality can really suck up your free time, y'know?
Ever since I picked up LSW2, I've spent most of my time playing it. At this rate, I won't have any mocs ready for NWBC. My kids are PO'd that Daddy is hogging all the video game time. Blah blah blah. Whadevah. Talk to the hand, squirts.
I've gotten through the "story" mode, and am working my way through the Free Play mode, collecting all the goodies and building up my stud count. EpIV is done, except for
Binky so happy with the server.
As you may recall, last month I found a way to optimize the BZPower database, and the site's been running much more smoothly since then. Our hits have been up, and the weekends have been stellar, with nearly 3 million hits a day during weekends in September. I've seen more than 500 people online at once, with the server behaving itself. After literally years of futzing around with the settings, it's truly gratifying that I've finally stumbled onto the right sol
I've always known I work better under pressure. Well, at least I get things finished under pressure.
So my local club is involved with the local LEGO store, we get to display anything we want (within reason) in one of their in-store "window boxes". One of the tall ones. The last few have been really good, starting with a mountain diorama (which Binky dropped in the parking lot), and an industrial facade built by my friend Steve. I helped with the mountain, but none of it was really mine.
T
