Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

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?

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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 p...

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.

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?

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?