brett's logjam

This weekend I realized that I have a few guitars too many, and resolved to either get them into playable shape or get rid of them. I kept one acoustic and one electric, and put the rest up for consignment at Amory Music in Five Forks.

The Ibanez GSR-200 bass guitar isn’t worth dwelling on too much; it was a serviceable instrument that I never played. Seriously — I got it twelve years ago in the event that I might play bass again, someday, in some theoretical band. I won’t miss it, because there’s no history between us. We’re strangers.

The Jackson JDR-94 Reverse Dinky and I, however — we have history.

Dark blue, with the crazy-aggressive reverse Jackson headstock, it wasn’t a wallflower. I don’t have many concert pictures from the mid-nineties, but I used the Jackson (pictured here, in concert with The Lozenges) the way it was meant to be used: to play grinding, grungy metal and alternative rock. Good times.

(Well… mostly.)

I don’t have any studio-quality tapes from that time to let you hear how the guitar sounded back then. Heck, I don’t even have any good quality tapes from that time. But I dug up an old practice tape of mine from 1994 with a band called Mostly Harmless, which at least preserved the noise from the jam sessions. (“Sound boards? We don’t need no stinkin’ sound boards.” sigh)

You can hear the Jackson on the tracks below:

• Hologram
• Onyx Sun
• Joan of Arc

(I did mention the production quality is non-existent, right? Right.)

On the first track it’s the rhythm guitar, and somehow manages to not cut totally loose until the 5:30 mark. The second track has no such qualms: next to the drums, it’s the loudest instrument in the room. The third track is sadly missing the guitar solo at the end that is present on a few other versions, but the rest of the mix on those takes is so bad that I can’t in any good conscience put it online.

It’s a good guitar, and I hope it finds a good home with someone else. If you’re looking for guitars in the Williamsburg area, please consider stopping by Amory Music and giving it a try.

But it’s time for me to let go, and move on.

An Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) perches on the deck in my backyard.

I seem to be on the mend; I actually enjoy taking bird pictures again.

Flowers, too.

My ear is healing well, with substantially fewer periods of dizziness or pain. It’s still a bit numb, but as the nerves were cut it’s expected. (Apparently, it’s going to itch a lot when they regrow.)

I am cautiously optimistic about regaining some hearing. I think it’s a little better, especially in crowds. I’d like to see the hearing test results in a month or so before really believing it, though.

Mostly, I’m glad it’s all over with. Less thinking about ears, more listening to birds.

The weekend was filled with a welcome set of domestic activities, none of which were beyond my abilities; mowing the lawn, planting some trees and bushes, putting together a bookcase for T.

This is a modest list, to be sure.

But I take great joy that these tasks were merely exhausting, not debilitating.

It’s a welcome change.

Found the bug. Everything’s working again.

Astute readers will notice that the last few entries have some, uh, problems: no individual entries, missing pages, appearing on one index and not another, that sort of thing.

The short answer is that the weblog is borked.

The long answer is that Movable Type, the blogging engine that powers this site, has bogged down under 8 years of entries, and is failing to properly publish all of the templates.

Actually, it’s failing to publish any of the templates completely correctly, and I’m updating by hand.

And no, I didn’t change anything. There are, however:

• 2178 published entries,
• 6 different indexes,
• another 8 archive templates,
• all with nested modules.

Recent entries took 10 minutes or more to publish; the last complete site rebuild took over a half-hour.

I am running custom templates in the MT 3.x codebase on the BerkeleyDB backend, with no clear upgrade path to MT 4.x on MySQL. There are database issues. There are template issues. There are time and is-this-really-worth-it? issues.

So.

It appears that the future of brett’s logjam is suddenly, unexpectedly … murky. Uncertain. Up in the air.

Suggestions on how to proceed are, as always, welcome.

I know that I have that other site for posting stuff like this, but sometimes, I can’t refuse. Because there are some things that I must call out to my friends.

Like cows.

Pirate cows.

Yarr! Mooo!

As you were, then.

The tulips in my front yard are doing quite well this year. I suspect it helps that there are very few deer paths nearby.

Also, if you like flowers, I highly recommend visiting the Keukenhof near Lisse. I recommend it even if you don’t like flowers, because it’s that wonderful an experience.

This is a somewhat obscure technical problem, but several ISPs have recently begun hijacking mistyped domains and directing them to ads.

This is bad on several levels. Wired has a story about how it’s even worse than you thought: it lets hackers (the bad kind) hijack any site on the web.

The hole was made possible by ISPs subverting the Domain Name System or DNS, which translates website names into numeric addresses. Instead of simply returning an error message to a user’s browser when a user typed the name of a website that doesn’t exist, Earthlink and others instead substitute a page of Yahoo ads and suggest alternate spellings for the non-existent site.

The ads are served up by a British company called Barefruit, which pretends to actually to be the non-existent domain when delivering the ads.

Due to unforeseen consequences and Barefruit’s failure to screen for rogue JavaScript code, that forgery allowed a hacker to create perfect fraud site imitating eBay that looked in the browser address bar to actually be legitimately hosted on ebay.com.

…

“The entire security of the internet is now dependent on some random ad server run by some British company,” Kaminsky said, adding that he’d talked this week to many internet companies who were pissed, though not at him.

“I can’t secure the web as long as ISPs are injecting other content into web pages.”

Known ISPs who are doing this: Earthlink, Comcast. Verisign did this a few years ago, but doesn’t anymore. (Instead they steal domains when you search for them, which is a different level of evil.)

The best solution is to not use affected DNS servers. If you are on Comcast or Earthlink, use OpenDNS instead. It’s reliable, very fast, and free.

The Governor’s wife and her attendant walk through the Palace grounds of Colonial Williamsburg.