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What Would D. Boon Do?

For The Huffington Post, David Rees, author of the Rolling Stone comic Get Your War On, posts an over-the-top tribute to the Minutemen’s D. Boon on the 20th anniversary of his death. “… my career as a political cartoonist literally began the night I asked myself “What would D. Boon do?” before clumsily trying to make the comic-strip equivalent of a Minutemen song.”

The tribute is way hyperbolic, but all true. The Minutemen changed lives, mine included. Happy birthday Boon. Let the products sell themselves!

Music: The Minutemen :: Paranoid Chant
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Roll-True Reel Spindles

Sears-Projector Planning to dig up our 30-40 year-old Super 8 home movies to watch with family this Christmas, and Dad’s projector’s gone belly up. Craigslist to the rescue. Every time I deal with Craigslist, I’m amazed by the sheer number of flakes and false starts — people who say they have what you need and then never respond again, or who say they’re interested in what you have to sell, make an appointment, and never show up. But amongst the clowns, some kind soul generally comes through. Scored this 1960s vintage Sears Super Automatic for a song (though the replacement bulb is going to cost more than I paid for the projector).

The machine itself is a work of art. Loved the manual that came with, full of golden lines like “It’s easy to splice 50-foot rolls of 8mm film together on Sears 400-foot reels for full half-hour shows.” Easy-peasy! Can’t imagine why this wonderful technology died…

Update: Jim Strickland pointed out a great source for old bulbs and lamps : ETE Tubes — they found me a working bulb for 1/3 the price of other bulb vendors, and shipped it 2nd Day Air. Wonderful.

Music: Smog :: Cold Blooded Old Times
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The Chronic (What?) Culls of Narnia

Caught this amazing rap on SNL last weekend (Lazy Sunday) with Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell mackin’ on cupcakes, Google Maps, and “The Chronic.” “What?” “Culls, of Narnia.” Tip of the Kanga to Beasties, Matthew Perry, and Mr. Pibb. Amy and I have been riffing on this all week. Miles gets in on the act too. “Pass the chronic!” he yells, loud as he can, and we all fall down laughing.

Thanks selenevomer

Music: Mission of Burma :: Learn How
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Server Move Complete

Went for it last night, and Birdhouse Hosting is now in its new home. Four hours to securely transfer 65 accounts totaling ~20GBs of data between two cPanel servers. Considering that there’s a lot more to transferring an account than copying a home dir around*, the cPanel-to-cPanel transfer mechanisms are pretty good at getting it right. DNS propagated overnight, and we’re live with a VPS in a quad-CPU, 8GB, hot-swap setup.

Only two small glitches to mop up this morning – the alternate SMTP port wasn’t open, and apache was configured to choose index.html before index.php when both present. Other than that, the migration was flawless and I can start thinking about making a Christmas shopping list. Let’s see, shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a tally of naughty and nice Birdhouse users…

* Users databases are off in /var/lib/mysql, mail forwarders and aliases are in /etc/valiases/*, mailing list archives are kept deep in the bowels, crontabs are here, quota settings are there, service plan features and packages somewhere else entirely, foobar is behind my left ear, and it all has to be packaged up neatly and restored on the other end inside an accompanying account with all passwords intact — not a fun job to do manually (I’ve been down that road) but pretty much effortless with the cPanel transfer mechanisms.

Music: ABBA :: Thank You For The Music
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Beefier Birdhouse

Birdhouse is moving! We’re about to undertake a migration of customers from our current dedicated server setup into a managed reseller environment, where we’ll be setting up shop on a beefy quad-CPU box under the watchful eye of a dedicated management team. As some of our sites get more and more popular, we’re seeing increasingly frequent load issues on the current single-CPU server that we can’t manage effectively. The goal is to free myself up from server performance considerations, so I can focus more on development and implementation.

To celebrate the move, we’ve just raised virtually all of the limits on all of our hosting plans — more email accounts, more databases, more add-on domains, more everything. It’s nearly impossible to stay competitive in an industry that puts the airline biz to shame when it comes to overselling, but we think these new plans bring us quite a bit closer.

The actual move may not happen for another day or two, but we’ve got nearly all our ducks in a row now. We’re not anticipating any downtime, crossing fingers. See you on the other side!

Music: Rickie Lee Jones :: Danny’s All-Star Joint
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Brilliant Sushi Doc

First foray into Google Video begins with a documentary on Japanse Sushi, with less emphasis on the food than on the customs and etiquette of the sushi-ya. Equal parts educational and comic-surreal. You’ll even learn why some Japanese people’s feet smell of vinegar.

“Maa maa maa maa.” “Oh toh toh toh.”

Thanks baald

Music: Bruce Lash :: Innocent People
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KTG POST Problem Licked

No response from iTMS affiliates program on the POST problem. Total brick wall trying to contact a human there, but I’m not ready to give up on being an iTMS partner while iPod is king. Finally solved it with a workaround (which I hate): If user voted on the previous lyric, the vote is processed, then, rather than displaying the rest of the output immediately, the browser is invisibly directed to the next page through a location header rather than POST. User still gets the same page she would otherwise, but links to iTMS now work without throwing a confusing “Re-POST?” dialog in the browser.

Also signed up as a Rhapsody affiliate, so non-iTunes peeps are not locked out. Most lyrics now have dual iTunes/Rhapsody artist links. Thanks to mneptok for kicking my butt on that.

Love how trivial it is to create links to artists in Rhapsody, e.g.: http://www.rhapsody.com/PatsyCline — which means I can auto-generate the URLs. So what was a 10-hour database population job for iTMS was a 5-minute job with Rhapsody. Hey Apple: Cluetrain!

Music: Chrissie Hynde :: Nebraska
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18-Carat Accuracy

Refreshing, after recent high-profile controversies about the accuracy of Wikipedia, to see the results of Nature‘s blind side-by-side comparison of 42 Encyclopedia Brittanica and Wikipedia articles by dozens of scientists. Wikipedia fared only slightly worse relative to Brittanica’s accepted standard of accuracy. But how good is the standard?

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia [emphasis mine]. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. … “People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Twidale adds. “Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.”

Thanks Paul

Music: Billy Bragg :: Between the Wars
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Biodiesel Paradox

The demand for biodiesel is up so sharply that world-wide industries are ramping up non-petro oil production. Soy bean oil predominates in the U.S., but palm oil is cheaper to produce. So the last remaining vestiges of rain forests in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are being razed to make way for palm oil production. Salon:

Biodiesel activists have responded to the latest depressing news by calling for biodiesel labeling. For those of us in Berkeley, already carefully distinguishing between farm-raised and wild salmon, and searching for our free-range chickens certified to have passed away happily in their sleep, it will be one more thing to pay attention to. Biodiesel from used French fry oil: good. Biodiesel from Thailand: bad.

Better way: Use less oil.

Music: Mark Eitzel :: Auctioneer’s Song