Can I view my blog posts?

We all know that it's considered evil to click on ads displayed on your own site, right?

What if you're getting CPM ads? Is it then evil to view your own pages?

I haven't quite figured this out. Anyone care to shed some light for me?

We're back

After what seems like forever (even though it was only 5pm - 11:30 am), we're back up and running. Time for me to get some sleep and warm up my feet. It's too cold in the basement without shoes on.

Hour 13 and counting

I'm well into hour 13 of the site being down, but I'm finally making progress. MySQL support got me to rebuild all the tables to our last successful backup, and now I'm using bin-log files to rerun all the queries that had been run since then.

With any luck, I'll have this almost ready to go around the time the call center and warehouse start showing up and needing it.

Wow... this sure cut into sales. But it could have been worse, I guess. I'm not sure how, but I'm sure it could have been. I guess if none of the backups were successful, that'd qualify.

MySQL Platinum Support being used

We've got a pair of replicated MySQL database servers. That's great - until the replication process corrupts both. That's the situation we're currently in.

Much to my (dis)pleasure, I get to use the platinum support that we paid a bunch for. I called them and had an engineer on the phone within 15 - 20 minutes (they answered right away and had him call me back, which was awesome.)

The little bit of hair I have left is getting pulled out by the minute, though. It's really not simple troubleshooting a crashed pair of servers, as we've already been working on this for 4-1/2 hours. I'm waiting for the engineer to contact me once again, so I thought I'd post something quick.

This was, however, a great opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of MySQL enterprise.

Oh, the joys of doing business online.

Want to work for Google?

I recently spotted an ad saying that Google is looking for a few good people for their AdSense team. It looks like Mountain View and New York at this time.

http://www.google.com/jobs/aspireadsense/

If you get the job, make sure to write us little people. :)

Decided to podcast - here's my process

I decided to start podcasting my other blog. This has meant a pretty big learning curve, but I already had the hardware I needed and much of the software.

I've had several people ask what I'm using, so I'm going to list everything I can remember for now and I'll do some follow-ups later.

To begin with, I'm using a Shure SM58 microphone. This is sort of the vocal standard in our local bands, and it works quite well for what I'm doing.

I send this into a Behringer Ultra-Voice Pro. Like I said, I had the equipment. This item is discontinued, although most any vocal pre-amp is going to work fairly well. Just look for something that has a compressor, enhancer, noise gate and a voice optimized EQ.

From there, I have some vocal effects that I'm not using, so I send the signal directly to my M-Audio Delta 1010. This thing has really come down in price since I paid for it. I think list was around $1000 at that point, and I grabbed it for just under $600. This is probably overkill for this application, but I could always have a bunch of guests over and record them all at once with this.

At this point, the signal is flowing into my PC. But what am I using from there?

First, I record using Vegas software. I'm using an older version, and if you look around you'll probably find one of the lower-end versions that can do this for a fraction of the cost. I've just become very accustomed to this software for multi-tracking my guitar, bass, drums and vocals, so I didn't want to have to learn something else. It also has plenty of built-in effects, so I can add a little reverb, delay if I like, drop in sound effects, have a music track in the background and record multiple takes, editing out parts that didn't come out how I wanted. This is essential when you're not doing a laid back interview or radio program.

After I get things done in Vegas, I export as a .wav and make sure the mix came out right. I open that up in Audacity, which could probably do the recording I do in Vegas just fine, but I didn't want to learn another program for recording. I added the LAME dll so it'll export in mp3 format, and then I transfer the file up to the web server.

For that blog, I'm using WordPress, and the podPress plug-in sure makes adding in a podcast simple. It automatically puts the file into the feed for the podcast, creates all the iTunes attributes and includes download links with a flash mp3 player embedded in the post. To send the feeds out, I decided to go ahead and let feedburner handle the feed compatibility issues.

There you have it... the "Simple" proccess I'm using. Now all you need is content. ;)

Not posting much here...

For those of you wondering why I haven't been posting much here, I've had a bit of a distraction over at my new blog, oneboxer.com. I'm talking Google Base optimization techniques over there for showing up in the onebox results. I've got posts done for the next two weeks, so I'm going to do some posting here once again. I just wanted to give everyone a head up as to what's happening here.

Amazon stories - what does the "Also bought" tell us?

So there is a link going around right now, which most people just think is funny. I think it tells us a sad story.

Barbie uses a drill to prepare rabbit rotisserie style, which was killed by running it over by a bike, was skinned by a pocket knife and will be eaten by a roboreptile. Obviously, that's the only conclusion one can come up with. Why else would someone need all that stuff with a fresh whole rabbit?

How important is one-box?

Todd has convinced me to start a new domain, so the contents of this post have been relocated on my new blog.

How important is one-box?