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...
So, who else will be going out to get their copy of LEGO Star Wars II today?
I know a ton of my time is going to be spent with a PS2 controller in hand over the next few weeks. The demo I got to play at Traveller's Tales whet my appetite like you wouldn't believe. Several hours flew by.
:-D
Ah, vacation time. Writing from my hotel room in Disney World. The sun is hot although the sky is steel gray from hundreds of wildfires pouring smoke into the atmosphere. Spent yesterday at the pool; later today is Epcot (again) for Mother's Day Brunch.
Actually made myself ride Everest at Animal Kingdom, and even with two Dramamine I spent the next several hours looking green around the gills. The rest of the family loved it; I'm a wuss when it comes to rides like that. More my speed is "Spa
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
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
"It's here! The new LEGO catalog! It's in the mailbox! Yay!"
"As daddy, I get to read it first."
"AWWW! No fair!"
"No, but I'm bigger, so gimme."
Every few months, it's the same. Most of the sets I see splashed across the colorful pages of the LEGO catalog are already familiar: better posed pictures of constructions I've seen either at fan sites or by being a LEGO Ambassador. The new AT-ST, for example - that's one sweet set, which will definitely be on Binky's birthday list.
Thi
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
More boring techie stuff.
Last night I adjusted the database preferences, so the server looks like it's humming along at a nice pace. The slowdowns have been far fewer, and the hour-long offline spell from this morning was due to my fixing the Hot Topics. So I'm pretty happy with that.
The only problem is the mail server is still down. That means email is not being sent through BZPower.com. This is a problem for several reasons: No thread notification emails New Blog entry notification is
Have ya ever noticed how crawly BZP gets after a while? I sure do. But where everybody else gets to just complain about it, yours truly is the one who actually has to do something about it.
We get lots and lots of hits a day... about 2.5 million, actually. That's a lot of database traffic. Every forum and blog page hit, as well as every news story page, has at least one database call - sometimes up to a dozen per page. So the DB traffic gets measured in number of hits per second, and sometime
I bought myself a Mindstorms NXT last week (actually, the wife paid for it, but I'll pay for it in oh so many little ways). First thing was to build "Alpha Rex" and get it to do something. Kinda boring, actually, although an interesting build. I really like the new sensors and motors, there's a ton of potential with them.
After building ol' Rex, I had halfhearted notions of slapping some Bionicle pieces on it and posting a "moc" of Bionicle Rex but I decided against it, for some reason. It's
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
Woo. The last few weeks have been somewhat intense work-wise, with lots and lots of stuff happening at once. It's like surfing a killer wave on a Pop-Tart sized board. Deadlines breathe down my neck like werewolves with halitosis, ready to rip me if I falter. Herds of butterflies rampage in my stomache when I think about all that's due and the very short timeframes in which to do them.
So here I am, working on a weekend, pounding away on a spreadsheet with all the content for the next site la
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
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
OK, so I just took delivery of the first of the 2008 games that will go live in early January. They're better than I had expected. The graphics and game play are very fun, and there's even better to come. I think you'll like it. It also included 45 seconds of CGI, which was just finished today.
It's fun being the one to set the deadline.
It's also awesome to see this all come together... the project really started the second week I was at LEGO, back in August, and here we are in December
The clubhouse is empty.
We knew it would happen. The space was graciously loaned to us by a local mall, and included two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows. We set up in early January, and were told we'd have it for probably a couple of months. So being able to camp out there until the end of May was excellent.
Unfortunately, it gave us a lot of time to pack in a ton of brick. Which had to be packed out again in three days. Ooh, my achin' back.
So that's what it looks like now, more
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
The last week has been a nightmare trying to keep this stupid server up and running. I'm still not sure what's going on with it, but I'm ready to pull what little hair that remains on my head out in big clumps.
Right now, I've got the forums offline, since the server was dying every few minutes and not coming back. After throwing a temper tantrum for a while, I dried my tears and wiped the snot away and decided to optimize the database again. Looks like a good thing, too... the members and po
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.
Well, it's been more than three months since I started working at LEGO as the Internet Content Manager for BIONICLE (and Racers and Technic). I've gotten to the point where I feel I actually know what's going on, what I'm supposed to do, and when I'm supposed to do it.
Not only that, it feels like I'm making a difference, too.
I've been lightly involved in the '09 movie, lightly involved with watching the development of the '09 sets, but more heavily involved and driving the 2008 web prese
After some discussions with people inside LEGO, I'd like to find out what you think BIONICLE is. This doesn't have anything to do with anything, just satisfying my own curiosity.
What is BIONICLE to you?
Answer the Poll
Thanks for your participation.
Peak Oil
One of the blogs I regularly cruise, the amusing and quixotic Dilbert Blog by Scott Adams (language warning, so I'm not linking), featured an entry today about Global Warming. Reading the comments, I ran across a couple of interesting links that made me think a lot, and maybe change part of my world view.
(Boringness warning: the following talks about non-Lego, non-toy, end-of-the-world grownup stuff. Skip if you are easily bored or display any symptoms of ADD.)
Now that I've s
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
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).
I'd like to thank everyone who cast their votes in the Sets DB over the last week. The information was very helpful, and I've passed the rankings on to the BIONICLE development team. I think this will help everyone understand what the uberfans like, anyway.
The top 10: Toa Lhikan and Kikanalo Exo-Toa Muaka & Kane-Ra Lewa Mata Toa Norik Takutanuva Vezon & Kardas Keetongu Oohnorak Maxilos & Spinax
