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Volunteering, Ray Bradbury, and Chalga

I have a hard time posting quick stream of conscious posts and usually feel the need to re-read, edit, research etc…before submitting a post. Reason being is that I usually don’t want to just splat something up for the sake of it. I want it to be something worth contributing that people will find interesting. Many times there’s just a neat site I wandered onto or some weird thing happened in the day. Now I have Twitter for some of these diversions, but for the most part I usually want to expand on them. So, in an effort to try and post more I will be trying to do post more when I have a group of items that I can lump together to create a single interesting post.

I think I already broke the rules by defining them in that previous paragraph. Oh well. On to it.

This was a great week. I had a kickoff meeting with a great non-profit organization that I will be doing some web contracting for. I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve always wanted to feel that my work was somehow making a difference and here’s a chance to do it. Along the same lines I also volunteered to be the coach for my daughter’s soccer team and yesterday we had our first game. Although for her age group it is encouraged not to keep score, the game unofficially ended with my team winning 1-0. We had about 3 practices prior to the game and it was really exciting to see the work payoff and the happiness they had. I think I may get addicted to this volunteering thing.

I also made my way out with my son to the Los Angeles Festival of Books which is an annual event that is held on the UCLA campus. This was my first year going, but I was very excited because I had recently been in touch with a friend that I hadn’t spoken to in over ten years. In our recent conversation he let me know that he had recently been accompanying Ray Bradbury to help him at book signings. I decided to go and surprise him as well as get an autographed copy of “The Homecoming” for my son. This is a beautiful book that was illustrated by comic book artist Dave McKean. The other thing my friend helped me discover was that Ray Bradbury is a great poet. To be honest I wasn’t a huge Bradbury fan, but after reading a few of his poems I have to say I probably will become one. His books of poetry are mostly out of print but I was lucky to get one from ebay. The one I was able to find on Amazon is called “I Live by the Invisible: New & Selected Poems“. I’m really looking forward to reading these and getting them signed in the near future.

Lastly I mainly listen to KCRW radio here in LA. It’s a great public radio station, and is the primary source for me to discover new music. They offer a webcast which I can’ recommend enough if you want to find truly alternative non-pop music. But I also listen to NPR as well. I was listening to a story the other day on Marketplace called “Working: Life as a Bulgarian pop star“. It’s an interesting story about a Bulgarian genre of music called Chalga. I recommend listening to story as it was pretty interesting. I’m always intrigued to discover international music I’ve never heard before. Here’s some videos for a quick introduction.

3.1 Magnitude Earthquake with Epicenter 6 Miles from my House

I live in Chatsworth California, just on the border of Northridge, so I should be accustomed to earthquakes…but I’m not. I don’t think you can ever get used to them. So less than an hour ago when my room started to shake I braced for what appeared to be a decent sized quake. Turns out it didn’t last too long and was only 3.1 magnitude but it felt much worse because I was only a little over 6 miles from the epicenter.

Whenever I feel (or think I feel) an earthquake I point my browser to the USGS recent quakes page to verify and get more information. I clicked on the recent quake image that linked me to the information page for this quake and noticed a new link below to a KML file to show the location using Google Earth. Since I knew the quake was close by and I had already mapped my home’s location, I thought it would be cool to load up this quake epicenter and map the approximate distance. So I loaded the USGS file and then used the ruler to to draw the distance from my house. Very cool (well technically speaking, not quake proximity speaking) stuff as you can see by the pictures.

Over the years I’ve had a knack for working in high rises. Well, high for Los Angeles standards being on the 16th and 21st floors for two separate positions. In both cases I was the lucky recipient to experience earthquakes in them. Feeling the slow swaying of a building at that height is not a good feeling.

Anyways, nothing like a Monday wake up call from Mother Nature on the day after earth day.

Making the Digg Front Page and My 15 Minutes of Web Fame

It’s been a week since I made the Digg front page for the first time and I thought I’d reflect on it a bit.

Bored on a Saturday night and laughing about my bank telling me about my Google check bouncing, I decided to blog about it and go to bed. I awake the next day get my coffee and make my way to the computer. I run a Firefox extension called Adsense Notifier which syncs up to my adsense account and displays impressions, click-thru rate and earnings in my status bar. When looking at it this morning I realized that I had already served about four times the number of impressions I usually serve in a day. I immediately had a feeling that a high traffic site must have linked to me. So I went to my home page and sure enough I was down. I immediately went into live chat with my great hosting company Bluehost. The admin on duty was taking a look and suggested I grab several logs from my server to try and debug the issue as well. He pointed me to a directory were there was a folder titled “cpu_exceeded_logs” and another one called “mysql_slow_queries”. There were only a few logs on some scattered days, and the logs averaged under 100k, but there was one generated on this day that was 1.32Mb…oh oh.

Going through the log it basically listed get requests with execution times. Most entries were 2-3 hundreths of a second…but then I came across a plugin which after executing was followed by a 5 seconds of cpu time for the sql query to run. I use Wordpress to power my site and was able to get to my admin screen, and de-activate the plugin. I had also previously been familiar with a plugin called WP-Cache to increase performance in Wordpress by caching pages and limiting database queries which I thought would be nice to need some day. Well today was that day. So I installed it, and watched as it started caching my site. Shortly after that my site was back up. Now it was time to figure out where all the traffic was coming from.

A quick view of my traffic showed that Digg was a huge referrer with a title that described a post I made the night before. I have to admit I had a few butterflies knowing that someone must have submitted it and it was gaining popularity. It had around 250 diggs. I didn’t know Notyavgkat who was the submitter and was curious as to how he found my post. So I started to read the comments and refreshed the page every few minutes. 270 diggs…290 diggs. I then message a few friends telling them about it. Wow…congrats…good job…the responses were coming in.

Apparently my site was down for quite a bit so there were a few comments that took a deserving shot at me.

• MrBlack08 wrote “the check you wrote for hosting must have bounced too. 33 diggs and its down.”
• erkshirefarms wrote “Looks like your server bounced too…”
• Matdevdug wrote “Yeah, good to see you went with the expensive hosting option. . . . .”

Then there were some funny comments about Google

• lenin wrote “Google checks is still in Beta mode. Anything in beta mode is prone to some errors.”
• flaq564 wrote “Looks like Google needs a payday loan.”
• and my favorite russvirante wrote “Oops, we spent all our money on doubleclick”

And finally… thetaoofbill wrote “Why do I get the feeling this story was made up to try to get that next adsense check bigger?”

I then went over to Google reader and saw the post appear in my Digg feed. But shortly after I saw the original submitter leave a comment stating “it appears this got buried after just 345 diggs…..wtf…is google behind this ?”. I wasn’t too familiar with the how’s and why’s of a post getting buried but I decided to do a little research. Digg offers this vague explanation:

Submissions can also be removed by users with the “Bury Story” feature within Digg. Once a story receives enough “buries,” it is automatically removed from the Digg Upcoming or Popular sections. The number of reports required to bury is based on a sliding scale that takes several factors into consideration (such as number of Diggs, reports, time of day, topic submitted to, etc.). Buried stories can still be found the profiles of users who have Dugg the story; you can also find them by doing a search.

It appears that there is a bury brigade in existence which isn’t surprising since I’ve read several stories about a small group that seems to have control of what makes the front page. I did however start using Duggtrends which offers a page dedicated to buried stories which makes for interesting reading to see which stories are being “censored”.

Spotplex is a site that was created with the goal of a true democratic system which so many people feel is a huge flaw in Digg’s system. TechCrunch and several other sites have provided their views. I became a member and have enjoyed using their site. It was interesting to see how my site’s rank rose on their system. Especially for a story with Google as a tag.

Wordpress gets a bad rap on Digg when sites using it make it to the front page so I was happy to see a story titled “Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours“. It’s a great post from Elliott Back, whom I’ve mentioned before as the author of a Lifestream plugin for Wordpress, that discusses tweaks you can made to your server setup, php, mysql, and apache settings cache to improve performance using caching. It was nice to see all the haters commenting on how this Wordpress site was surely going down now that the post made the front page. But it looks like it never did.

I also frequent the beautifully designed site by Nick La and have used his Glossy Blue Wordpress theme. He too hit the Digg front page a few days ago with the release of his iTheme Wordpress theme. He felt the pain as well and posted a good story on the aftermath with resources.

Lastly, in an ironic twist of fate I actually did pretty well with Adsense on the day I got Dugg, actually earning just enough to cover the returned check fee from my bank. Go figure.

Search to Buy the Best Hair Dryer for my Wife

My wife’s current hairdryer had just died. It was a pretty good one that had cost her ~$100 (I had no idea they could cost that much). But she really liked it. We went to Costco and she bought some $20 model they had over there and had been using it but knew that she didn’t like it as much. Being the tech gadget freak that I am, I decided to employ my research and purchasing skills as if I were buying some new computer accessory, to find her the best hairdryer I could as a birthday gift.

So I searched around for some reviews and comparisons of top hairdryers out there. The best I found was “How to pick the best professional hair dryer” at Missiko.com and “Buying The Right Hair Dryer” from CBS News. After reading each of these it became clear that a two rose to the top which were the Farouk CHI Turbo & Rocket Ionic hair dryer as well as the T3 Evolution Tourmaline hair dryer. I learned about what makes these higher end hair dryers so much better based on use of negatively charged ions, tourmaline, and ceramics. So my next step was to find some user reviews for each of these which I found over at a commerce site called Folica.com. They had a good number of user reviews for the Chi Turbo, Chi Rocket as well as the T3 Evolution. After thinking about it some more I decided to get my wife the Chi Rocket. Needless to say my wife was very happy not only with the hair dryer I bought her, but with the research I did to make sure I got her the best one.

Guys, let me tell you, going through a process like this to get your lady a tech gadget can go a long way in getting her to appreciate the nuances of getting better gear. It can also open the door to her understanding why we go through so much trouble selecting our gear. Hopefully she will understand this as I decide which High Def DVD player I will be purchasing soon.

Spock Wants to Become the Ultimate Peoplepedia

Webware has put together a video of the top sites shown at the first Web 2.0 Expo (wonder when the conference will change to 3.0?)  which I found out about after reading a tweet (I still can’t say that with a straight face) from Rafe Needleman. One of them was Spock.com (I tried to resist a pointed ear quip here…whoops) which appears to be a pretty cool people search engine that uses the power of it’s users to generate, approve, and qualify the profiles of people with content much the same way Wikipedia does. TechCrunch also provided a preview and I found a great screencast that provides over 5 minutes of detailed functionality over at demogirl.com which gives you a good idea of what to expect. Now if I could only get an invite…