• The Sunday Poem/Song: The Married Life

    Hours Categories The Sunday Poem
    Comments 5 Comments

    OK, people are on my case about being late with the Sunday Poem, so I had better post something despite the fact that I am wrestling with site load. I am unsure what that means in terms of popularity of the Sunday Poem, since it’s only two people. But hey, two is better than zero. So even if I post the Sunday Poem, odds are it won’t increase load too much. 🙂

    This is actually a song lyric. I don’t have a recording of the song handy, so you will just have to come to a jam session sometime if you want to hear it.

    Married Life

    You fell in love and you signed the papers
    And moved home to annoy the neighbors
    And it was good, just fine, living the married life
    No kids yet, but what’s the hurry?
    They just mean you have to worry
    That’s no good, no time in the married life

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  • I seem to have outgrown my hosting

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 29 Comments

    I just spent half an hour on the phone with Bluehost, my web hosting service. In the past, I’ve given them fits with expensive SQL queries and the like, but we were always able to resolve the problem.

    This time, however, the verdict was, “You may have outgrown our hosting service.” The random “account suspended” messages you see are triggered by things as innocuous as serving up the favicon. The issue is just too many hits in a short span of time — the site may have just grown too popular. As I glance at the sidebar and see 40+ people here on a Sunday afternoon, it’s hard to argue with them.

    They do have a “high CPU” option for twice the price, but they also said “at this rate, it’s a temporary solution for you.” So they suggested that I might want to look into some form of dedicated hosting.

    Ugh. Expensive. Advice? Host recommendations? If I go to dedicated hosting, I may actually be obliged to actually push the ads I have on here so they are worth something, which would be annoying.

    After taking a thorough backup, I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.1 today, in hopes that this buys me a teeny bit of headroom.

  • Pondering Pinatas

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 22 Comments
    Viva Pinata X360
    Viva Pinata

    As my stalkers know, my Xbox Live profile has come to be dominated by pinatas — not because I am obsessively playing Viva Pinata myself, but because my kids have been. Endlessly. Perpetually. Mind-numbingly.

    (Let me take this moment to apologize to Matt Mihaly for the death of the critter he sent us. We locked it in a box because it was testy and kept attacking other pinatas. And apparently it starved to death in there.)

    The interesting thing about Viva Pinata to me is that it isn’t what you think it is. It looks like yet another take on the whole pet thing — virtual critters, only this time you have a garden to keep them in. But it’s nothing nearly so innocuous. No, you see, Viva Pinata is actually a game about animal husbandry in the “raise ’em and kill ’em for food” sense, and all of the cute little hats you can buy for them and amusing nicknames you can give them are just ways to tug at your heartstrings in the moment before you casually put them to death.

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