Sweet new tennis product

As many of you know, I'm a huge tennis fan. I love watching Nadal or Djokovic play at their best, but even more I love to hit the courts myself.

One of the problems with playing myself is improving. I've found video analysis of matches to be helpful, but it's been difficult to get a decent camera angle for recording matches. I can either get the view from behind or from the side, which is great for stroke analysis but lacks the best view for reviewing my shot selection, court positioning and overall strategy.

However, that's all about to change. A new product, debuting next month, is going to make a good camera angle possible for the average tennis player. It's called the VolleyCam, and the first generation was just about having a tripod that would extend to 13' in the air. The second version, which is what I got to demo, is a much simpler design that hangs on a back curtain or fence and allows for easy adjustment of the camera to get the entire court into view.

I recently took it out, along with my Flip Ultra HD, to see just how well it worked. After about 30 seconds of setup, I was ready to go and play. I set both cameras to record and played a match. While the match itself isn't the important part, viewing the results is. I'm including a video I posted on YouTube here to show the differece. I think the results speak for themselves.

I believe every serious tennis player will be interested in purchasing one of these. They'll be available soon at the volley cam website.

Back at it

I'm back at looking into ecommerce sites.

The good news? I have found something interesting that ecommerce site owners all over are going to want to see for themselves.

The bad news? They can't see it yet as I'm still developing it.

Give me a few days and I'll start sharing some of the insights that I get as I finish this project. It should be quite revealing when people start utilizing it.

Servers again

Since people seem to enjoy seeing our hardware (server pron), I thought I'd show our current setup again. I'll start at the bottom of our rack.

This is a pic with a few things. First, it's got the white system, which is our memcache box. Just your basic setup (dual dual-core opterons, mirrored 250gig SATA drives, and 32gigs of RAM) for temporary storage of blocks of output. Above it is our Breach WebDefend appliance. I'm not sure the specs (dual quads and 4 gigs of RAM I think), but since it's sold as an appliance it doesn't really matter. Last in this pic are 3 APC power management boxes. Since quite a few of our devices only have one power supply, this allows us to plug them all in to both power sources in case of an outage.

Continuing on up the line, we have one of our oldest servers. We call it www1, although being a www server isn't something it does any more. It basically runs cron jobs on its dual xeon processors with 8gigs of RAM and mirrored 80gig SATA drives. The next machines are a pair of IBM boxes that used to be our database servers with dual dual-core opterons and 8 gigs of RAM with mirrored 73gig SCSI drives, but they've moved to being backup (one to be used as a second DB master and one as only a slave for doing backups.) You can also see our two load balancers, which will probably end up being retired this year in favor of newer models.

Here, you can see our Coradiant TrueSight. Again, it's sold as an appliance so I'm not real sure what the hardware is, but it sits on the network and watches traffic for anomalies in performance and user experience. Also pictured are our SMTP server and our admin server for the backend of our websites. Everything gets done there, then replicated across to the servers shown in the next picture.

These final 3 servers are the workhorses of our sites. Each one has dual six-core opterons with 32gigs of ram and 8 146gig SAS drives. The first two are used as web servers and are configured with Raid 6, the third one is our primary database server and is configured as Raid 10.

As you can see, there are some holes in our setup now. Literally, we've pulled machines out that sat between where things are now creating holes. Not a big deal, though. We'll get around to filling them sooner or later.

For those that have been asking to see the new machines, I hope you're happy. I'll be doing some reviewing of load balancers this year, so I'll share some of my thoughts on what I come across as I evaluate them. There are some neat looking devices and apps out there that I've seen already.

Need to defrag?

Somehow, it seems I need to defrag my system.



I'm not sure I had seen one this bad before. Yay, me.

Tennis Trakker Pro Stats

I recently got a new app for my iPod Touch to track stats. Since it wouldn't format well on the forum I was trying to share them on, I've listed them here.

Match Statistics by Tennis Trakker Pro
Event:	Fun Match
Date recorded:	2009 04 18 @ 14:02
Play time:	2 hours - 14 min.
Brian	vs.	Dana
6	Set 1	7
5	Set 2	7
	Set 3
	Set 4
	Set 5
General Play
172	Points played	172
48% (82/172)	Points won	(90/172) 52%
52% (90/172)	Points lost	(82/172) 48%
(4/12)	Break conversion	(5/8)
(3/8)	Break saved	(8/12)
Serves
48% (42/87)	1st serves in	(50/84) 60%
69% (29/42)	1st serves won	(31/50) 62%
78% (35/45)	2nd serves in	(26/34) 76%
54% (19/35)	2nd serves won	(20/26) 77%
3	Aces 1st serve	0
3	Aces 2nd serve	0
0	Foot faults	0
10	Double faults	8
Ground game - Winners
20% (11/54)	Forehand	(6/37) 16%
5% (1/21)	Backhand	(1/16) 6%
50% (2/4)	Volley	(3/6) 50%
50% (1/2)	Overhead	(2/2) 100%
0% (0/1)	Lob	(1/1) 100%
100% (2/2)	Drop shot	(1/2) 50%
17	Total winners	14
Ground Game - Unforced Errors
48% (26/54)	Forehand	(12/37) 32%
38% (8/21)	Backhand	(8/16) 50%
25% (1/4)	Volley	(3/6) 50%
0% (0/2)	Overhead	(0/2) 0%
100% (1/1)	Lob	(0/1) 0%
0% (0/2)	Drop shot	(1/2) 50%
36	Total Unforced	24
Ground Game - Forced Errors
31% (17/54)	Forehand	(19/37) 51%
57% (12/21)	Backhand	(7/16) 44%
25% (1/4)	Volley	(0/6) 0%
50% (1/2)	Overhead	(0/2) 0%
0% (0/1)	Lob	(0/1) 0%
0% (0/2)	Drop shot	(0/2) 0%
31	Total Forced	26

Matt Cutts makes Chrome sad :(

I tried playing Matt's latest video, and it turns out he only makes Chrome sad by doing so...


Anyway, it's really cool that chrome can kill flash within a tab without killing the tab, but I find that it has to do that quite often with YouTube content. Just one more reason I don't need to use YouTube. Maybe I should restart my browser more than every other week... nah!

Survey with odd number arrangement

I got a survey from Sun about our not renewing MySQL support. That's fine, I can answer those types of questions, but please - don't make me think about it.


That just takes too much time to figure out what number I want to choose. Hopefully the database on the other end understands the confused responses.

My son is a know-it-all

According to his report card, my son is a know-it-all.



I just love the wording for the checkbox at the bottom... "knows all"... CHECK

First Episode of Ecom Phenom Created

The first episode of Ecom Phenom has been created. We gave some general information on who we are, what the show is about, and what topics will be coming up.

We also set our schedule... 10pm Central on Sundays. You should be able to tune in live and even call in if you have questions. The live chat was pretty cool as well.

Overall, BlogTalkRadio was really awesome and made it easier than what I had been doing for shows recorded at night. I'm pretty happy so far.

My big tall Christmas wishes

So Robert Garcia is having a little contest that looks like fun with some pretty simple rules and some great prizes.

My first wish: Leadership with a clue.
This wish shall be granted come January. At minimum, it'll be more of a clue than what we've had for the past 8 years.

Second wish: More time to develop a couple sites.
I have some sites in mind that would really help out the Church in general with some social aspects and ways to drive people back to the church. I think a lot of our problems in society come from the weakening of the church in many people's lives, and I'm really feeling a calling to build something on that side of things.

Third wish: Stable economy.
Much of what has been going on has been due to poor choices by a lot of people, but it feels like it's mostly up top. See first wish. ;)

Fourth wish: Better retirement for everyone.
Too many retired people have to get jobs these days, and that makes me sad. Retirement should be a time to enjoy grandchildren, see those places you've always wanted to go and just generally enjoy what's left of life, not start a new job or even a new career. Oh, and see first wish. ;)

Fifth wish: Easy green alternatives.
It's possible to go green in many things now, but it's a lot of work to find those alternatives. It should be easy to do something good, not take a ton of extra effort. It shouldn't be so hard to get from place to place without a huge carbon footprint. Enough said about the green, other than see first wish.

So, as part of the contest, I get to tag someone now. I'll tag my dad's Honest Bargain Blog, mostly because he's in need of links, but also because his wishes could prove quite interesting.

Don't wait for an invite, though. Join in today.

What lunches sound the worst?

Sometimes, what you order sounds much worse than what you eat.


We nicknamed this the Chippendale special. The order was hot-and-naked with bowtie and a spicy sausage. It sounded very indecent and gave us all a bunch of laughs.

What else do we need to try that sounds really inappropriate?

I did it!

After weeks and weeks of use, and a reboot this morning even, I finally did it. Yay Me!



Do I get a prize?