<p> I honestly don&#39;t know that there&#39;s every been a time when I sat in a room with, at a guess, 80 people and knew most of them. Maybe 16 years ago when I was VP at Mallet, if absolutely everyone I knew came to a party I could have managed it. But only maybe.</p> <p> I spent most of the weekend at a yoga workshop, with 80 or so people in the room, and you could count the number of people whose names I didn&#39;t know without taking your shoes off. And I could rattle off the names of ten or twenty other people I know who are part of the kula but weren&#39;t there.</p>

<p> <a href="http://grc.com/">Steve Gibson, of SpinRite fame</a> has come up with sort of a <a href="https://www.grc.com/ppp.htm">super-simple variation on the little RSA keyfobs</a> where you instead carry around a little business card that you can print up yourself that has a bunch of possible second-factor entries you can use for auth.</p> <p> The part that makes me laugh a bit is that it is–as you might expect if you remember the ads for SpinRite back in the day–a Windows .DLL coded in assembly.</p>

<p> In an attempt to break the rather somber mood surrounding the announcement than my paternal grandfather–suffering from last-stage Alzheimers–has just been put into hospice care, my brother-in-law revealed that in order to get into the Chukker to see Dick Dale before he was actually 21 he went dressed in drag…because apparently they didn&#39;t card drag queens.</p> <p> I have to admit that I have nothing to say to that, other than to note that <a href="http://www.druidcityonline.com/Questions%20Chukker/chukker%20inside%20pics/pages/G%20chukker.htm">the ceiling mural</a> looks nothing like I remember. But I didn&#39;t go to the Chukker that often because it was across town and, well, you know, drinking and driving is pretty dumb.</p>

<p> Which was my initial reaction to this video of a man making farting noises with his hands to perform along (horrifyingly accurately) Iron Maiden&#39;s <em>The Trooper</em>.</p> <p> You. Must. Love. The. Internet.</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/S1WKYmx4i1Q?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p> <p> It includes the guitar solo. That happens at about 1:45 left. It is indescribable. And he&#39;s just so into it.</p>

<p> So a friend of mine and Anne&#39;s wanted to take a Tai Chi class at <a href="http://insideoutbodytherapies.com/">Inside/Out</a> (where I teach yoga on Thursdays). This being one of the couple that we invited along to swing dance classes earlier this year, they invited us along to Tai Chi classes.</p> <p> It&#39;s funny how much yoga stuff I have to not do to Tai Chi correctly–it&#39;s a much more relaxed, softer practice than yoga. So in that sense, it has been valuable to highlight habits I&#39;ve acquired and make me think about them once again.</p>

<p> <a href="http://blog.madduck.net/">Martin F. Krafft</a> posts <a href="http://blog.madduck.net/debian/2007.10.10_not-so-chatty.xhtml">some stats about the debian-devel mailing list</a>.</p> <p> The long and the short of it is that over its 12-year history, it&#39;s averaged one message ever 25 minutes. Put that way, it sounds like no big deal, but then thinking again, what mailing lists are going to be able to show that sort of volume over such a long time-span?</p>

<p> I caught the first couple of episodes of &#34;Life&#34; and found it intriguing enough to drop a Season Pass in the TiVO.</p> <p> Some things are a little overdone–they seem to believe that every episode requires a scene where Charlie is able to make a nigh-magical connection with someone they need to talk, presumably because of his time in prison–but hopefully the writers will see fit to abandon those more obvious tics.</p>

<p> Not, obviously, that this is of real importance to me–it&#39;s been years since I used <a href="http://blosxom.sourceforge.net/">blosxom</a> myself–but Chet&#39;s <a href="http://miscellaneousheathen.com/">still using it</a>, though I know he&#39;d started talking about moving to something else. Maybe now he won&#39;t feel the need.</p>

<p> But apparently <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_stacking_problem">it is</a>. Well, long-standing, at least, since it is apparently <a href="http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0707.0093">no longer a problem</a></p> <p> <a href="http://www.chris-lamb.co.uk/2007/10/09/optimal-solution-for-the-block-stacking-problem-found/">Via</a></p>

<p> Funny enough, it was a fix for a bug in the software (<a href="http://www.gnome.org/~seth/gnome-blog/)">gnome-blog</a> I am using to write this post.</p> <p> It was mostly a matter of figuring out what was failing–a GConf interface was failing when the app tried to store an integer–and then searching around <a href="http://diveintomark.org/&#39;s">Mark Pilgrim</a> excellent (and freely-available) <a href="http://diveintopython.org">Dive Into Python</a>.</p> <p> If I was really together, I&#39;d post a patch, but I didn&#39;t back up the original.</p>

<p> Still <a href="http://catalyst.perl.org/-based">Catalyst</a>, but this time with a database back-end that also does asset (aka binary files) management.</p> <p> For about 30 seconds during development the software actually had 100% test coverage.</p>

<p> This is one of those times when I hope whatever pathetic amount of google-juice I have can aid others.</p> <p> Googling around, I have found many oblique references to running horde/imp/turba/etc. using fastcgi, but very few specifics, and what specifics I found are mostly about using <a href="http://lighttpd.net/">lighttpd</a> (which is a fine server, but we&#39;re not using it yet), and those for apache seemed wrong, or at least way over-complicated.</p> <p> For maximum applicability in today&#39;s world, I&#39;m going to do this using <a href="http://fastcgi.coremail.cn/">mod_fcgid</a> under apache2, since mod_fastcgi is <a href="http://fastcgi.com/archives/fastcgi-developers/2007-June/004717.html">basically dead</a>.</p>

<p> but the <a href="http://gnome.org/">GNOME Project</a> and <a href="http://anusara.com/">Anusara Yoga</a> both date their foundings to August 15, 1997. Which was, incidentally, my father&#39;s 48th birthday.</p> <p> Happy Birthday, Dad!</p>

<p> as they all seem a little tepid…but maybe the the appearance of <em>Stardust</em> <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0486655/">on the big screen</a> will get me to finally go out and buy the original <a href="http://www.dccomics.com/graphic_novels/?gn=6325">comic</a>.</p> <p> And who knows, maybe I&#39;ll just go see it for the helluvit.</p> <p> But what got me to write this entry (the first in far too long) is that I ran across <a href="http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Calendar/Film?Film=oid%3A513707">a review in the Austin Chronicle</a> that made me laugh with the first line:</p>

<figure> <p> As shown at right, Netflix is suggesting I should get <em>The Last King Of Scotland</em> because I liked <em>Little Miss Sunshine</em>. One suspects their algorithm contest has not borne the sweetest fruit.</p> <figcaption> Little Miss Sunshine leads to The Last King of Scotland? </figcaption> </figure>

<p> You know, IE7 looks like a reasonable browser, but it&#39;s not. To prove this it&#39;s not even necessary to resort to something like CSS compliance, where no one else gets it entirely right either. It doesn&#39;t even get HTTP right. That is, when confronted with a perfectly legitimate 204 status code if fucks up. Spectacularly.</p> <p> Now why would someone be using a 204 status code? Well let&#39;s look at <a href="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html">the language in the standard</a>:</p>

<p> I wish I had had <a href="http://rhymereason.net/">Rhyme &amp; Reason</a> back when I was actually writing poetry. From the FAQ:</p> <blockquote> <p>Rhyme &amp; Reason is a suite of online tools for poets and lyricists. It includes an editor for writing verse, an integrated dictionary, rhyming dictionary and thesaurus for finding words, metrical scanning tools for identifying meter and rhyme scheme, as well as features that allow you to share your work with others and comment on other writers&#39; poems or lyrics.</p>

<figure> <img src="../tucker.jpg" alt="../tucker.jpg" title="../tucker.jpg" /><figcaption> The most devoted Tucker </figcaption> </figure> <p> At a few minutes past 11am today, we put Tucker to rest. He had just turned 19 on May 1st. He was unimaginably old, but up until the last week or so, he seemed comfortable and happy. He was still climbing on top of the television to get in his basket, and climbing up the stairs to visit me in my office when he got lonely.</p>

<p> One of the more interesting things about the Great CD-Ripping project (I&#39;m within 30 discs of being done!) is realizing what I have never gotten around to ripping. Frankly, some of it baffles me. For instance, I had never gotten around to ripping my Stevie Wonder material, despite the fact that it&#39;s some of my favorite music on Earth (it&#39;s the stuff from the 70&#39;s, when Stevie could Do No Wrong). I never ripped either of the Who discs I have. Or the Los Lobos collection Chet got me umpteen years ago, even though I think that <em>Kiko and the Lavender Moon</em> may be one of the most perfect songs ever.</p>

<p> Check out his drum solo:</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/4SCZv7786KY?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p>

<p> I have to say, the sheer quantity of food being consumed made me more than a bit green. I&#39;m not paragon of restraint, but there&#39;s no way I could eat this much for one day, much less seven. <a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/healthy_eating/article1640930.ece">Read all about it</a>.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_04_22.html#006667">Via</a></p>

<p> You know, I thought I was the only one who did this.</p> <p> Back in &#39;01, I slapped a big King Crimson logo on my Thinkpad; ostensibly to make it easier to track it through the then-new airport x-ray dance, but, I suspect, really as a throwback to grade-school. It accumulated a couple of &#34;I Voted&#34; stickers over the next few years, and then I slapped a number of Kerry/Edwards stickers on it while I was in DC.</p>

<p> <a href="http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/04/12/ouch/">A law professor&#39;s story about Microsoft</a>.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twitter-developer-alex-payne/">Twitter is apparently finding that Rails doesn&#39;t do massive scaling well</a>, at least not the way that all the books will tell you to write stuff for it.</p> <p> That doesn&#39;t really surprise me. Making applications that scale well is <em>hard</em>. I&#39;ve done it twice (though only one of those is a web app), and in both instances, what I found was a need to be able to muck around with the lowest-level code to be able to create app-specific speedups–whether that was writing my own hand-tuned demented-but-fast SQL or being able to back stuff up against memcache that most people wouldn&#39;t think to put in there, like mutexes (and yes, I know it&#39;s not a reliable storage medium, but given the rate at which it fails, we were willing to face potential issues).</p>

<p> This is mostly one of those &#34;maybe my googlejuice will help others&#34; posts.</p> <p> So, a few weeks ago I went to sync my Treo with j-pilot, and nothing happened. Normally I press the &#39;sync&#39; button on the cable, wait a second, then hit the &#39;sync&#39; button on j-pilot, but suddenly, nothing. I haven&#39;t been worrying about it–I&#39;ve gone much longer without syncing, and I&#39;ve been awfully busy.</p> <p> Anyway today I decided to figure out what was going on. There are some oblique references to the problem in some bug reports, but I&#39;ll lay it out explicitly here.</p>

<p> Laughing at this, that is.</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uLQRv0RjBBM?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p>

<p> I&#39;m sure it&#39;s been blogged hell-and-everywhere, but this plot of US housing prices in the last century realized as a (literal) roller-coaster, <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2757699799528285056">is just too good not to note</a></p>

<p> …at least so far: I finally sat down and listened to the Ani DiFranco CD my sister got me, maybe a decade ago.</p> <p> Before I continue, one funny note: I knew about Ani DiFranco before she did; I remember, albeit hazily, seeing video of a bald chick playing ferocious acoustic guitar in weird tunings on a public access channel in Boston. As is often the case with seeing things in weird venues like that, they never told me who the fuck it was I was watching. So, you know, years and years pass…</p>

<p> In response to someone making a comment about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Effect">the Osborne Effect</a> (how scary is it that you can guess URLs for Wikipedia entries with a reasonable assurance that they&#39;ll be there?) on a photo forum, one of the people who was at Osborne at the time makes <a href="http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1021&amp;amp;message=22319970">a post to set the story straight</a></p> <p> Basically: corporate infighting brought things to a halt in a company that <em>always</em> had problems with cash-flow, since they were undercapitalized and in manufacturing.</p>

<p> So maybe everyone else on the planet earth already knew about this, but the idea that one of Judas Priest&#39;s signature songs was originally a Joan Baez tune was somewhat, err, startling.</p> <p> I am intensely curious to know what Joan Baez thinks of the cover version.</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/M4rNgXS850o?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p>

<p> There is no way it can be a good thing to have <a href="http://www.chiptune.com/">an emulation of the Amiga written in javascript</a>.</p> <p> <a href="http://ajaxian.com/archives/amiga-emulated-in-javascript-2">via</a></p>

<p> <a href="http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page">A Christian/American version of Wikipedia</a>, complete with such brilliant statements as:</p> <blockquote> <p>Did you know that faith is a uniquely Christian concept?</p> </blockquote> <p> <a href="http://fflewddur.livejournal.com/299828.html">Via</a></p>

<p> But now I&#39;m staring down the barrel of building a new box for holding a lot of media files, and suddenly, the notion of being able to expand your RAID5 array started to sound important–especially when the case I initially intend to use won&#39;t hold more than 3 drives, but I would like to be able to expand later.</p> <p> As is almost always the case in the geek community, <a href="http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2006/09/09/raid5-online-resizing-with-linux/">someone has documented their experiences</a> doing just this. Its sounds extraordinarily painless. Even resizing the filesystem on-line was a no-brainer.</p>

<p> or maybe you were lucky and sustained a blunt-force trauma to the head that swallowed that memory.</p> <p> For those of you who remember it, though, <a href="http://www.theatermania.com/content/show.cfm/section/synopsis/show/128881">you can catch an absurdist stage production</a>, and, if you&#39;re lucky, <em>you</em> could play Keanu&#39;s part because the lead is selected from the audience each night, to:</p> <blockquote> <p>read their entire script off of cue-cards. This method manages to capture the rawness of a Keanu Reeves performance, even from those who generally think themselves incapable of acting.</p>

<p> <a href="http://newsfromme.com/">Mark Evanier</a> (a funny guy in his own right, as co-creator of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groo_the_Wanderer">Groo the Wanderer</a> (yes, there&#39;s a Wikipedia article for it (YNCAN))) <a href="http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2007_02_19.html#012963">has a couple of points</a> about the attempt to create a conservative version of <em>The Daily Show</em>.</p> <p> The one that made me laugh was simply on conservative comedy:</p> <blockquote> <p>It&#39;s like (I&#39;ve said this before) making a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one.</p> </blockquote> <p> And, of course, there&#39;s a much more devastating point:</p>

<p> Walt Kelly&#39;s <em>Pogo</em> has never been collected in its entirety–something less than six years were collected by <a href="http://www.fantagraphics.com">Fantagraphics</a> in the &#39;90s, but that was something less than it&#39;s full 24-year run.</p> <p> Well, they&#39;ve decided to do to <em>Pogo</em> what they did to Charles Schulz&#39; <em>Peanuts</em> (and several other strips)–<a href="http://www.fantagraphics.com/blog/archive/2007_02_01_fantagraphics_archive.html#2583732417830212795">publish the whole run, in order, in a series of hardback books</a>.</p> <p> I&#39;ve heard reviews of <em>Pogo</em> that suggested that it wasn&#39;t always as great as people remember it–and really, what is? But it&#39;s hard to ignore a newspaper comic strip that was considered threatening enough that, &#34;his [Kelly&#39;s] phone was tapped and the US Government corresponded with a newspaper reporter who claimed that the eccentric patois Kelly created was a secret Russian code.&#34;</p>

<p> You know, if, at 18, I had needed to choose a favorite author, it would have been RAH, hands down. I think it&#39;s fair to say that I&#39;ve read everything he&#39;s written except for his first novel (that was only published a couple of years ago).</p> <p> So, a couple of months ago I was browsing my shelves and picked up <em>Stranger In A Strange Land</em> for the first time in probably a decade and a half.</p>

<p> OK, that was mostly to get your attention, but I do find it interesting that in both of the recent movies about Truman Capote (<a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0379725/">Capote</a> and <a href="http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0420609/)">Infamous</a>, Harper Lee–who was born in 1926, and thus 33 at the time of the events in each film–was portrayed by a woman <em>at least</em> a dozen years older than she was.</p> <p> I mean, what&#39;s up Hollywood, did you forget you&#39;re supposed to cast younger? Not that I&#39;m complaining, it just seems bizarrely atypical.</p>

<p> <a href="http://blogs.walkerart.org/offcenter/?p=631">of <em>course</em> the law has to be written in verse!</a></p> <p> I applaud the state of Minnesota.</p> <p> <a href="http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/02/extremely-short-legal-entry.html">Via</a></p>

<p> Tech support through the ages.</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/eRjVeRbhtRU?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p>

<p> So, I was recently in Best Buy, and noticed a Panasonic &#34;phone system&#34; <a href="http://www2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/vModelDetail?storeId=15001&amp;amp;catalogId=13401&amp;amp;itemId=100551&amp;amp;catGroupId=34154&amp;amp;modelNo=KX-TH111S&amp;amp;surfModel=KX-TH111S&amp;amp;cacheProgram=11002&amp;amp;cachePartner=7000000000000005702">that could interact with your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone to receive and initiate calls over your cell line transparently</a> when it was in range of the base station.</p> <p> I was deeply enamored of this idea…but they don&#39;t admit that they work with the Bluetooth implementation in Treos, and they seem to promise dire consequences if you try to use an unapproved phone. Uniden has <a href="http://uniden.com/products/productdetail.cfm?product=ELBT595">a similar system</a>, and it seems much more liberal, though, so all is not lost.</p>

<p> The idea of Frank Zappa on a mainstream game show is pretty much incomprehensible from the start. I wonder what his mom thought.</p> <p> <div style="position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden;"> <iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" loading="eager" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vRNnRJny9j4?autoplay=0&amp;controls=1&amp;end=0&amp;loop=0&amp;mute=0&amp;start=0" style="position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; border:0;" title="YouTube video"></iframe> </div> </p>

<p> Anne and I have had a copy of this out from Netflix for, I&#39;m not kidding you, three months. We <em>finally</em> got around to watching it last night.</p> <p> To say that I&#39;m glad I didn&#39;t grow up in a small town–I spent a fair amount of time in small-ish towns, but always as a transient outsider–is perhaps obvious.</p> <p> It&#39;s got a lot of the flaws I anticipated, but that anticipation is at least partly informed by the existence of this movie–it isn&#39;t impossible to see how it would have been fresh and new, oh, you know, around the time I was born. So it&#39;s worth seeing, even if only as a historical document.</p>

<p> I am obviously not enlightened, for while I occasionaly show signs of being an adept at <a href="http://liw.iki.fi/liw/log/2007-01.html#20070116b">Honya Budo</a>, I often fail to be able to even master the &#34;Way of the In-Out&#34;.</p>

<p> It&#39;s always good to be back.</p> <p> That we stepped off the plane and immediately drove to the opening of our friend Lila&#39;s <a href="http://gatewayyoga.com/">new yoga studio</a>, where, much as we expected, we ran into a bunch of people in the kula, and got to tell them about our trip and hear about how we were missed during free week and generally catch up, and then we went to dinner at an <a href="http://www.lillyspizza.com/">excellent pizza place</a>, well, it definitely made us happy to be home again.</p>

<figure> <img src="../breakfast.jpg" alt="../breakfast.jpg" title="../breakfast.jpg" /><figcaption> My favorite coffee house/cafe in DC </figcaption> </figure> <p> Well, on the one hand, I&#39;m sorry that the 2-hour practice class that I had intended to go to isn&#39;t on today–I found this out from the teacher at the class that we went to yesterday.</p> <p> But the class last night, after a lot of walking, has left me worn out anyway. So instead I&#39;m enjoying tasty food.</p>

<figure> <img src="../dukeelingtonbridge.jpg" alt="../dukeelingtonbridge.jpg" title="../dukeelingtonbridge.jpg" /><figcaption> You learn something new if you pay attention </figcaption> </figure> <p> This is the bridge that lies between our hotel and Adams-Morgan. As many times as I&#39;ve crossed it, I&#39;d never noticed the name.</p>

<figure> <img src="../sushitaro.jpg" alt="../sushitaro.jpg" title="../sushitaro.jpg" /><figcaption> The best sushi place I&#39;ve ever gone </figcaption> </figure> <p> If I lived in DC, I&#39;d end up awfully fat from eating like this at lunch. As it is, I try to make a pilgrimage to <a href="http://sushitaro.com/">Sushi Taro</a> when I&#39;m in town, because it&#39;s the best sushi I&#39;ve ever had. From left to right, there&#39;s eel, smoked salmon, amberjack and two kinds of mackerel. I&#39;m not sure what the last probably says about me.</p>

<p> So, slashdot had <a href="http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/69904889/article.pl">a story about the new Falcon storage engine for MySQL</a>. I don&#39;t care for MySQL for a number of reasons, but some–though not all–could be alleviated with a better storage back-end. So I cruised over to check out <a href="http://www.mysql.org/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-falcon-features.html">the Falcon feature-set</a>.</p> <p> Funny enough, with the exception of the next to the last point–which is a potentially non-trivial point, I admit–this is all stuff that PostgreSQL has had for years.</p>

<p> So after <a href="/2006/12/the-water-callers.html">the Water Callers&#39; performance</a> the other night, I said hi to one of the performers, Bart, and after greeting me by name, he expressed some surprise at having, in fact, remembered it. I, in turn, made what in retrospect sounds like a bit of a graceless comment about how it was a good guess, regardless, since it was the most popular name for male children around the time I was born.</p>