Sunday, November 23, 2008

New Look for BobKlass.Info

I am a copycat. Scott recently added new theming and functionality to mylifeinaminute.com and it prompted me to look at some alternatives. After two or three minutes of shallow thought, a new theme was selected.

It looks and works better for me on my new studio monitor in 1920x1200 (yes, it's the month long Black Friday celebration when new gear finds its' way into my setup).

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Prophylactic Reboots of SharePoint Servers

Up front, I will admit that I've always been a fan of prophylactic reboots of servers. Any servers. In the NT4 world, weekly. In the Solaris world, monthly. And in the Windows Server 2003 world, monthly. But things are not always equal, and SharePoint is a huge wild card.

WSS/MOSS 2007 causes IIS some heavy duty pain. Put it up, leave it up, and eventually, it will die. We've all seen it, and I'll bet those of you who are lucky enough to run SP1 or other patched up  systems have seen it too. Hopefully we will get all patched up soon too, but I don't expect that to make things perfect.

The unexpected crashes of IIS seemed to do the most damage to the indexing process. The indexer itself can take a hit and stop functioning (you probably will see a lot of junk in the event logs) or the web front ends it is trying to use might unexpectedly crash. We got slightly toasted (not quite burned) by this several times.

Since we started rebooting the farm Saturday night (before Sunday's full crawl), things have been better (I would hate to say perfect, but it has been perfect).

I know that server folks don't like prophylactic reboots. They really would rather address the problem, but since some of what ails SharePoint servers are real bugs, memory leaks, etc., this kind of thinking has to give way to good, old fashioned, weekly reboots.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Halloween Psychobilly Party to Remember

Some of my friends call psychobilly "halloween rock." This seems especially appropriate when that season rolls around. Last Friday's show was a special kind of party because it marked the last Lords of the Highway show with Sugar on bass. 

Lords fans are like a family (a family that likes to party!) We turned out in big numbers since this was a special occasion. Crazy people, some in crazy costumes. 



The Music
The Slackjawed Yokels, Horror of 59 and Lords of the Highway were on the bill. The Yokels reunion sounded great and was a blast. I've seen Horror of 59 a couple times before. Since Sugar will be in the band from here on out, I will give them more attention. The Lords gave one of best performances (out of how many have I seen?? - It feels like maybe 50?? but probably less).

The Recording
Bob and Dale Boots had the recording rigs going pretty well (Keith the taper was there with his too). We got a feed off the soundboard to one iRiver and another room microphone up high on a mic stand to another iRiver. We haven't combined them yet, but it should make a great surround mix.

The Photos
I almost didn't bring a camera. I wish I could capture a night like this on video, but the Beachland Tavern is just too darn dark. I grabbed my old Cannon and had it in my back pocket most of the night. That's what you see above. I have Dale's pics on a different computer and maybe I'll post those too. He got some good shots.

The Beer
If the Beachland didn't make a killing that night somebody robbed them. It was flowing. I must criticize the bad Great Lakes on tap (I think it was Dortmunder, but it tasted like soap). I got it early in the evening (early was around 10:30 and my complaint was not answered with a free one as it should have been). I switched to other stuff, and had plenty! It was a good time for all.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

I Wish I Took This Advice ...

... then, as the man says, you couldn't blame me for any of the mess!


Do what you like today. I voted absentee a few weeks back. At least I could tune out most of the garbage that flies through the air during election time.