Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Getting ready for the holiday season means beefing up our infrastructure around here. So, I got to order a new box for Memcached . It was even a simple server, just two dual-core processors with dual 250 gig drives from Sun running Enterprise Linux. What's fun about it, though, is that it has 32 gigs of RAM from the start (once I drop the chips into the box, anyway) and is upgradeable to 64 gigs. Now that's fun. I figure that going from the 4 gigs on one server we were running last week to 4 gigs on 3 servers we were running this week to 2 gigs on 3 servers plus 30 gigs on a dedicated box we'll be running in a couple weeks means we're going to be set for some serious growth. Now it's time to plan for a happy holiday season. At least our website shouldn't go black come black Monday.

I'm not a headset fan. I'm not a phone fan, either. So I'm playing around today with a bluetooth headset on my PC, seeing if I can get that to work with Skype. If it works well, the radio show on Thursday should be interesting. I could wander around the office and talk if I so choose. Could be fun. :)

I've had a few days off for some testing, and that gave me some time to reflect on what I'm doing and what I had hoped to accomplish by this point of my life. I never really got into the usual hero type hopes as a kid. I rarely, if ever, dreamed of being a police officer, firefighter or in the military. My dreams were much different. I wanted to be a mad scientist. I even enrolled in ChemE at UNL, which I didn't realize until recently was part of that mad scientist dream. But as I started taking those classes, I realized I didn't really have anything I wanted to do with that career path... I just thought it sounded interesting (I was wrong there) and I had heard it paid well. Along I went into Management Training at Radio Shack. That was pretty short lived, too. I realized that the 70 - 80 hour weeks that were expected at the time for under $20k/year salary as a starting manager wasn't really what I wanted, and I ended up getting kicked out shortly before completing...

Once again, we've made lots of changes at ToolBarn. But now, I'm looking for some feedback. We've got a cache on our local servers of what most of the competing sites are priced at on every product we offer. If we show that, similar to Progressive Auto Insurance, are we asking for trouble? Two thoughts on why we should : 1) Establish ourselves as a destination. 2) Give our customers less reason to leave our site and look around. Two thoughts on why we should not : 1) We may not always have the lowest price. 2) We've got more traffic than most of these sites, so we'd be building their brand for them. Such a tough choice. We'll probably run an experiment at some point and see what it does. What do you think?

Anyone remember when VRML was being touted as the "2D Web Killer"? I do. I laughed back then... of course, it was more because I thought nobody would take the time to learn it and that it'd be tough to get WYSIWYG web designers to ever consider. Well, here we are years later. People are still programming flat (although 2.0 sites try lots of 3D shadows and the like) websites without that whole 3D interactive world. Granted, in 1998 I did play around with some 3D interactive stuff like this , but nothing like some of the VRML sites that came out that you could walk around to different buildings and the like. While I still think there's a place for that (Second Life seems like a possibility, but it's much more flexible in an app you run), I don't see it happening any time soon. Oh, and this post can be credited to my bookcase, where I noticed one of the titles "Java, CGI, VRML and SGML". I think my wife got that one for a web development class once and ...

Today, I was realizing I haven't done a post in a while, and I also got a new camera from the recent Woot-off. Combine those, and I got pictures of some geeky things. First off, above is my podcasting setup. I don't have everything mounted in my new rack from Rack Solutions yet, but you can see the stuff I regularly use right now. That cost a few pennies over the years. :) Secondly, those are the servers we use for ToolBarn. We have 1 more Google Mini that we'll be adding shortly to this mess, making 12U of our 13U being used and 1U for storing the external drives we swap out weekly for off-site backups as well as pass-through to one of the switches (we ran out of room on the back for those.) Finally, that mess is my desk at work. I regularly get working on too many things at once and can't really keep up on things. However, the dual screens are almost a necessity now, and I have a matching 22" at home along with a really nice 20" Samsung. I remember in the o...

We've been doing SEO 101 on Webmasterradio.fm for a while now, and we've been using Skype to do it. Today, as we get ready for one of our biggest guest names to date, Skype refuses to connect. I can't even pull their site up in a reasonable time. So what gives, Skype? I mean, quality had been slowly dropping over the past few weeks, but this is ridiculous. I connect for a bit, it drops, says connecting, connects for a few seconds, drops the connection and the loop begins again. So, as I type this, I've actually dialed out to NeO. However, it keeps going through that loop. What's up with that? This isn't going to work very well. Update: I did locate something here about it. Nice... 12 - 24 hours? That's a bit longer than I can wait for this particular call.