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Bleh, MySpace bought the non debt parts of Imeem and basically broke it all. It was bad enough that Imeem reduced clip lengths to 30 seconds. Now they're out of the picture. So please, forgive the horrid AT&T and other stupid ads in their stay.

This song has been running through my head for months. This song, while we're talking about music, has been in my head for months:

What it means to me is that it's harder for me to share music with you all. For now I am relegated to Youtube which is fine but I'm not always interested in sharing the video part.

I've just got gripes with the whole system, fair use, and DRM. I will gladly buy music that's worthwhile. Money is not the issue. The problem is all the suckers that have bought into iTunes and other controlled media and what it all means. Control and profit.

Now I am not on any soap box here evangelizing one way or another. I am simply sharing how sick I feel when I think about all this and how pervasive the idea of remotely controlling everything. I feel like there is a full on assault on freedom and expected fair usage. I get pretty depressed about it all. Sometimes I feel like moving to the country and raising cattle for a living.

But alas running away from things isn't an answer for me either.

We're making some great progress on our side project. I can't wait to announce it.

I like Zzounds more with every purchase I make. They've got free shipping on most orders over a certain amount and they price match. I found AKG 271 MkII headphones used for recording and mixing by the pros for a much better price on Amazon from some unknown retailer. Also, I found the headphone amp for about $10 less. Anyway, Zzounds matched the prices so I didn't have to gripe about buying it from some potentially shady seller or paying more to have piece of mind.

I'd like to be able to start recording with Crystal so this is the first part of that goal. Soon will be a new microphone (I think I'll do the RØDE NT2-A), pop filter, and shock mount.

The music in the following video is fairly formulaic for trance but it's a fantastic find since it, well, combines trance music and a rubber clad performer calling herself Rubberdoll. The song is Markus Schulz - Do You Dream.

Anyway, I might want to slow down with my posting! I have 2 hours a day of commuting on a train with wi-fi, whaddaya expect?!

I will hold back on the new mic until we get some tracks down. In the mean time I can use my Behringer B2-Pro. I'd rather fill out some more hard ware to get inspired by.

I've had some good exposure to the factory design pattern lately thanks to a co-worker who came by, looked over a block of if-else statements, and threw my mind for a loop. The end result is much cleaner and clearer code. I've also been reading a couple design pattern books.

Today I've done a quiet launch of the Guild Wars (GW) Ladder API as a beta. Below is the usage comment generated by the class that, well, is the API.

==============================================================================
GW LADDER API BETA

Example:
http://www.guildwars.com/competitive/ladder/?format=xml&ladder=guild

Argument/Options:
format		- xml, json, php-serial
ladder		- guild, hero
limit   	- 1-1000 (guild ladder), 1-1080 (hero ladder)
offset		- 0-1000 ", 0-1080 "
name		- string 1-50 chars
column		- column name (see example output for names)
order     	- asc or desc
callback	- string 1-40 chars (JSON only)

Errors will return in requested format output. Ladders update HOURLY: please
limit your calls accordingly.

NOTE: API is subject to change without notice. Currently available as BETA. 
For questions, issues, etc. please contact support regarding "GW LADDER API".
==============================================================================

It's not a very complex piece of code but I wanted to make sure that it complied with best practices in API design, flexibility, security, scalability, and RESTfulness. I think as people discover it and start using it I'll get a better feel for how its being used. Right now folks scrape our ladders parsing HTML from our ladder pages. Yuck! I'm using distributed caching (memcached) to store results and some throttling to ease the load in case load gets out of hand.

Another couple changes I've been making while working on new or refactoring old code is to avoid nesting 'if' blocks, avoid 'else' blocks, limiting myself to one evaluation per 'if', and put 'return' or 'break' code near the top of what I am doing. It has been interesting getting used to it.

PHP:

I'd prefer to use something like a function and then multiple returns but the theory is essentially the same. This makes code block easier to decipher. Couple some logging into this and debugging just got easier.

Recently I fell in the middle of a religious debate surrounding stored procedures (SP) and parameterized queries. I find that although there are a lot of textbook reasonings behind using stored procedures I find no compelling reason to add another layer of code maintenance in the development stack. All the seemingly overwhelming benefits of doing SPs dematerialize once you realize you can accomplish the same with parameterized queries.

However, I see clear benefits to using SPs to encapsulate components used cross stack like web and application development. Or perhaps between multiple web applications. At that point, however, wouldn't one rather employ the benefits of a service? And if you go the service route you are back at point one: why add another layer to maintain. I am by no means an expert on this topic but I have been very curious to find the facts. I just find that using SPs is a pain in the rear.

After cancelling my DI.FM subscription I've been actually able to locate a few great streaming radio stations. M2 and FG Underground out of Paris to name a couple. I'm diggin' the Electro-House sound. Here's After Hours (Original Mix) by Mellefresh & Deadmau5:

Crystal and I have been enjoying playing Aion an upcoming game from NCSoft that's already made a huge splash in Asia. It's a fun MMO that looks sexy and is interesting to play. We haven't gotten very far but its fantastic to finally play characters in a game I'd want to be.

Other then that, I'm playing EVE but as I'm shifting to music production again so I'm sort of not all that interested in spending my limited free time playing. But dudes, I am totally having an AMAZING amount of fun playing Metal Gear Solid 4. What a great title. There are a bunch of cut scenes and sometimes it is noticeable but it doesn't matter. It hasn't been since Ace Combat a few months ago that I've been excited to continue playing a game.

So yeah, the water from last weeks potential flood receded and nothing much to talk about there. My folks left for Antarctica so I will be swinging by their place to check on the cats and stuff. I hope they have a good time for its probably the first vacation where I question their sanity during the time when they decided to go there. I can definitely see the appeal especially during their "tour the whole world and see everything" kick as of late. I get to pick them up when they get back so I am sure I'll get to hear all about it. I went to Costco with my parents, before they left, and helped them pick out a digital SLR so they don't have to keep borrowing mine. The Nikon D60 will be quite adequate for their purpose. I also helped pick out a laptop for my sister. She really needed to connect to the digital world so hopefully she'll be online more often. We'll see.

Nate's son was born this last week. Check out his post about it. He and his wife are both very tired. We congratulate and wish them the best. Every kid is different. We mean well when we try and bestow our knowledge and advice to them but its all hard to gauge if it helps folks. The little guy will grow fast. Helen started crawling and pulling herself up on New Year's Eve. Now she'll crawl around the house. The smiles I get when she sees me break my heart. I love my family!

I just had a couple awesome break throughs on my music production. One example is watching music videos or listening to cuts and trying to reproduce the sounds and rhythms. I was listening to Armin van Buuren's "In and Out of Love", for example, and worked out most of the beats and sounds. Sure, some of this more pop techno or trance has some elementary writing but its definitely an ok place to start. I really like the vocal work on that track. Sharon den Adel's voice is marvelous.

Another break through is figuring out how to make direct monitoring work. Basically, when you record singing the singer needs to hear their own voice. It's really hard to record your own voice with a pair of headphones on while recording. So you directly monitor the voice as you are recording it. That way the singer can adjust their voice while they are singing. I was really struggling to get that to work because routing all the signals through mixers, sound cards, software; there are a lot of places that might be set.

Another cool thing I figured out was setting my brother-in-law's MIDI controller, the Axiom 25, to also control his DAW. I have the 61 so it wasn't hard to transfer some knowledge to his unit's configuration. However, once plugged in, you can set the keyboard up to control various functionality from buttons on the unit like rewind, fast forward, stop, loop, play, and record. Like I mentioned, I got the Faderport to do this and more for me but it was cool to have another bit of expertise under my belt.

I'm man enough to admit I like some musicals. Recently I enjoyed Moulin Rouge! and Phantom of the Opera. I just found an interesting concept for a rock opera in Repo. I haven't seen it; only reviews and trailers... but I am intrigued. It could be complete garbage. It's headlining Sarah Brightman so perhaps it has hope. Basically the premise is that in the future folks are indebted to a company which does plastic surgery and transplants because of some cataclysmic event. Very dark.

We finally opened an account with Sound Credit Union and have steadily been changing over our mailing address with our various creditors and utilities. We still have a couple stacks of boxes in our office room but the rest of the house is pretty much settled in. We definitely need to get some shelving or get rid of a few extras but nothing crazy. My biggest hurdle is coming home and after playing with the kids and eating, plopping in front of the computer.

Something now from the hard dance genre, How Hard Do You Fuck? (Original Mix) by Dr. Willis:

Speaking of computers... I have been playing a wee bit of Navy Field and have finally gotten to a place where I could buy the Heavy Cruiser Moltke. It has been difficult to play. Up until now the reload speeds of my guns have been fairly fast. Now there is a considerable gap in between shots. This means that I have to stay back, choose my shots carefully, and keep moving away.

I finally went and worked out last night. That was amazing. I used the elliptical machine for 20 minutes and then I did some weights for 10 minutes. I know it's not a lot but I am trying to take some baby steps. Another thing is that I started to work on my music too. I've been waiting to do this kind of stuff until after the kids go to bed which gives me about an hour every night to myself and/or with Crystal.

At work I've been working on consolidating several virtual machines into one running VMWare's ESXi. To accomplish this I had to use virtual hosts and some nifty Apache prepending of some PHP code to change the includes directory path. With that the web development server box will become a preview machine, a host for various company wide projects, and a web database server. Next I created a VMWare Player instance to run on my local box with a Samba share enabled to which I will sync my Perforce repository to. The next step will be to integrate a deployment scheme using something like Capistrano. I created a pretty neat deployment script at my previous employer so it is good to move in a direction that employs rollbacks and a build type deployment.

I'm also checking out Symfony and PEAR since it's clear to me now that I need to use things like that (frameworks/libraries) rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with every new thing I write. It's a total duh moment for me but I think developers need to get to this place where key concepts are solidly understood before using things like this. The biggest complaint I have is that here we are doing all this bad ass shit only to eventually (90% sure) be using C#/ASP.NET. Not that those aren't completely awesome and I am unstoppably willing to learn something new but I hesitate on whether or not they are the best choice given the popularity of LAMP based system for lots of major projects. In our interviews I have gathered that C#/ASP.NET developers seem to lack a broader understanding of underlying architecture and have a general lack of desire to develop independent projects both for web and otherwise. This isn't a generalization but an observation I have made with the small sampling of people we've interviewed.

I voted, did you?

A famous scene from the 1976 film called "Network" which has caught my attention (which mow I need to borrow and watch) while watching Zeitgeist: Addendum. The first, I would say, 30 minutes of Addendum is a fairly factual explanation of our central bank system but then the entire thing fall apart into a conspiracist New World Order rant ultimately advertising The Venus Project. The movie is simply a drive for humanism attempting to illegitimate faith and truth.

If anything I'd watch it just to familiarize yourself with the way our monetary system works. Like the criticisms I have read so far, the entire Zeitgeist thing brings up good facts and things to discuss and ponder but ultimately some of the stuff is misrepresenting and the eventual collectivist solution is just more "... of the disease itself."

I've been making an effort to make time to do things other than work, commute, vegetate, and sleep. I've had mediocre success in that some days I will spend the night playing with the kids and having dinner with them and then other days when I plop down in front of my computer and play Navy Field. Incidentally I have been able to finally purchase the heavy cruiser (CA) Admiral Hipper and then refit it to the CA Prinz Eugen. It's been a challenge to play the Kreigsmarine (KMS) in that game in that this particular faction uses the shoot and scoot tactic a lot. Unlike the British faction which has decent armor and fire power the KMS is more distant precision strike type game play. Anyway, it has been really fun.

Not to overload you with media but here is something a little less filthy, a little less dirty, but good none the less, Betty Boo & Jack Rokka - Take Off (Digital Dog Dub):

So after a while you need to watch this commentary by the folks at South Park to the Indiana Jones IV movie that came out recently. It's fantastic and mirrors my thoughts about what Lucas and Spielberg did that that series. I realize that the subject is horrible but I and everyone at the office couldn't help but laugh... uncomfortably.

More work has been getting done on my revamp of that troublesome web application. I've been meeting with people to see what all needs to get done to make it stable and secure. I think I have a pretty good grasp on the problem and how to fix it.

We're moving into the final staging of selling our home in Bremerton. The final documents have been sent to our lender and everything appears to be lining up. The buyers are eager to buy our home and they even offered to take our cat.

Ah yes, I must share with you a blast from the past. I've been going through some boxes of things that I have been hanging on to. Lot's of wonderful memories come flooding back. I really enjoy it. A picture I drew of a house or factory floods me with memories from where I was when I drew it. There has been quite a number of things that I have found in boxes. I suppose why hold on to some it. Maybe my design for bicycle mounted rocket launchers will be adopted by our police since they want to be green but carry sufficient lethal force.

We have quite a bit of stuff back at the house still. In the house I have my piano and a china set. In the garage is a pile of donation stuff, a couple computers, the rain barrel, spare tires, sofa chair, a card table, and a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. It was quite overwhelming when after we stuffed Crystal's dad's truck only to find we have quite a bit more to go through. The good news is that we have found that a lot of the bulk is actually poorly packed boxes (because we left Belfair in a fair hurry) so things are compacting quite nicely.

Here's a little somethin' I was groovin' to today, Savant Garde - Trigger Happy (Acquavivas Original Edit):

I have been tired lately. I stay up late to get some time to myself (or with Crystal) and by then I am just pooped. I don't even get up all that early but if I am not in bed by midnight I am worthless after that. I am planning to drive out to Bremerton Saturday by myself to load up stuff to take to my parents house. I wanted to store some stuff at Jerry's place but I feel terribly guilty doing so!

Work has been progressing. I have some portions of our little contest automated finally so it will remove a lot of human error out of the process. My only gripe right now is that the server I was running this stuff on was in the same data center as the web database. The server is being requisitioned for the wiki and so my IT contact wants to move my stuff to their office data center. I have run several scripts and even tried navigating PHPMyAdmin only to find things timing out and taking forever. My script that finds the winners for a contest we run takes a little under 2 minutes to run in the first data center. On the VM in his office it runs in a little over 2 hours. Ridiculous.

It's been about three or four years since we last live in an apartment. Back then we were eager to move but in hindsight we should have stayed there. Our apartment was nicely laid out, the rent was $749 a month for two bedrooms, and we had a great rapport with the management. We had some issues like "stompy" above us and the adolescents who had their lame discussions quite loudly on the deck outside our bedroom window.

The new apartment, thus far, has none of these social problems thus far. I hope it continues. The biggest source of noise is from outside construction and the News Tribune constantly calling at 8 am asking for our subscription. The construction looks like it will be finished soon. They built a new bridge over the creek and are installing the railings and utility vaults now. As far as the News Tribune annoying the crap out of us, we've told them to stop calling on a couple occasions. How persistent these people are!

And now for a break to watch Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip - Letter from God:

Work has had some difficulties arise. Some stuff that was worked on a long while ago has come up on our founders' radar and so suddenly I need to deliver some immediate fixes. My schedule is clear, my ultimatum unwaivering: fix the problems. Make it stable and secure. It's in moments like this I see Henry and Helen in my mind's eye. Crystal cheering me on. I may not fail.

I went through a few more boxes in our office this weekend. It was supposed to be one of those "nothing is planned let's relax" and it quickly morphed into a busy weekend of pumpkin patches and family. It's all good. I will post pictures soon.

This last weekend the family went to the Seattle Science Center. It was a lot of fun and the place was a lot bigger than I imagined. We started in the dinosaur section which terrified Henry. After we took a break to play with the over sized chess pieces the bug exhibit was a hit. I think Henry was the loudest kid there pointing at each and every pinned specimen and shouting "BUG"!

It was our second choice, actually. We initially wanted to take the kids to the zoo but weather decided otherwise. I haven't been there for a long time. Some of the stuff was interesting.

After that we stopped and got groceries just in time for Jerry and Jeanine to come over for dinner and discussion. It was nice to have people over. I have gone through more of my boxes and expect for a couple stacks in the house most of our stuff is unpacked.

Here is a track by Electrixx titled Tokyo Rush (Original Mix):

The fella from church was able to get my tire fixed which is wonderful. I put the wheel on and took my car for a spin. It feels really good when things are in good order. In a couple weeks (read: next paycheck) I will be getting my wheels aligned. I'd like to also install my sub-woofers into my car. It's been more than five years since those babies have played sound. I really wish my car had Internet so I can stream my tunes to the car. I have found satellite radio severely lacking in both quality and selection.

I admit that driving again has me a little stressed at times. Riding the bus and ferry systems has shielded me from "road politics". I suppose one has to deal with politics wherever there are other people. So far I have found that I get to work in about 45 minutes if I drive to Seattle and take I-90 to Bellevue. I-405 is its usual cluster fuck 4 out of 5 weekdays in the mornings. Driving home after six has been fine.

Oh! Navy Field has quasi announced a sequel Navy Field 2. It will be at least another year before it is released but I am very happy the company has decided to continue developing the series. I just upgraded my ship to the next light cruiser called the "M Project". It has less armor but an extra turret spot compared to its predecessor: the Königsberg.

Last night we drove to Bremerton for house church. Afterwards I met up with a fella I know from church to move the recliner and organ out of the house and garage. It was really tough but it's really nice to get that stuff out of the house. The big things left? The piano, a sofa chair, and a ferret cage. There is still a bunch of loose ends but it's going to hopefully quickly all get taken care of.

Oh, I also have a potential fix for my flat tire. You see, no one will fix the darn thing because of wear on the inside walls. Apparently I was running on it under inflated too long. Anyway, after trying several places refused to fix I may have found someone willing to do it. I understand the liability but I have eight months of tread and time I need to save up the thousand bucks it is going to cost to replace them!

Helen is on the verge of sitting up on her own. She's steadily been leaving the realm of completely dependent which is nice and sad at the same time. Henry has been very active and we've been hoping to keep him occupied with more than things around the house. It's awesome to see his little personality grow and the little things that make him unique come out. He likes to sort, play with army men, race cars, watch Pixar animated movies, play with a ball, watch daddy play games, and join conversation with indiscernible babble. My favorite moments are when he runs to me to give me hugs and when he obeys. Not because I expect my kids to do exactly as I say but that he is learning what is the way of things from rules to whatever. I love my family.

Crystal and I have had some solid growth lately in our relationship. I admittedly have a passive-aggressive nature about me at times. Seeing my faults through my interaction with my father has been powerful. Relationships are full time jobs whether they are with your kids, spouse, or whoever. Neglecting them watches things peter out.

I've been working on making some big changes to some large applications on our website. Well, I've been doing a lot of work all around. I consolidated thirteen virtual machines to two. One for our development environment and the other for our development database. Using virtual hosts, nifty apache prepending, and wild card DNS everything is easy to work with. Samba has been set up to share one drive with all our sites as sub directories. This set up will be super easy to integrate into whatever version control system we end up going with. Also, I am trying to secure our fantasy sports like guessing game. I've changed SSL certificates and am working to use a game to web log in feature instead of a separate user account DB on our site. Finally, there have been some problems with calculating the winners of the event because either a file breaks or the process doesn't finish. A rewrite is what I want and it looks like that is what I am going to get. I am moving to program on the game client soon so I have a little time to do things right. I feel a little bad because this app was my baby and why should something I did need so much effort. I suppose with how the entire system from web front end all the way to game interface was put together with duct tape and surgical tubing. As soon as I finished with it I was inundated with other tasks and the entire project (if I can call it that) was never really owned by anyone. Now that is has gained popularity and will go on indefinitely (and eventually have similar events built for Guild Wars 2) its going to get a good one over.

I've been listening to my DI.FM subscription and the Electro-House channel has been, in my words, filthy sick. I just listened to a mix by DJ Anna Kiss and I almost passed out. I wish I could link to it but I did manage to find a video on Youtube above. I have kind of steered away from Puls Radio and have really been digging the subscription site, Radio FG, Hard FM, and RauteMusik Funky and Club stations. HHUK has been annoying me in that they have been replaying a lot of mixes over and over while having a crappy 128 Kbps quality. It actually sounds like 96. Not sure.

It looks like Jerry has gotten sucked into Navy Field! Haha, I am so glad. It's something new and it verifies that I am not crazy for liking it. That or we're both nuts.