Category: General

“The drive-by technorati are well-informed, curious and always probing. They’re also hiding… hiding from the real work of creating work that matters, connections with impact and art that lasts.” – Seth Godin

Wednesday night, I came down with strep throat. Thursday, after a nurse at the clinic confirmed it – I started taking penicillin. Almost immediately, my throat was better. Also almost immediately, my hand started swelling up.

Back to the clinic, where the doctor suspects cellulitis from a minor burn I received a week ago (so minor it’s not even visible on these pictures). That was being aggravated by the penicillin She gave me a different antibiotic – one focused on the cellulitis, less so on the strep.

If the swelling goes past the black line – I head back to the clinic.

Thankfully, Jonathan Coulton has a song for this:

Get yours here

Related:

Note: this post (like many of my others) is a record for me to track re-occurances or anomalies.

I woke up Saturday not feeling well – and it went downhill from there. Aching joints, extraordinarily tired, mild nausea, waves of chills, a strange metallic taste in my mouth, and a sharp pain in my left armpit. No cough, fever, or sore throat.

All highly unusual – none of it conducive to parenting. Especially odd as no one else in the household had any recent symptoms. Nor had I been anywhere unusual in the past couple of days. I made it through the day and went to bed when the kids did after dinner.

After sleeping fourteen hours – I was back to normal again.

This was so quick, debilitating, and out-of-nowhere – I needed to write it down.

“All of our stories that do well on Hacker News share one thing: they are written. By written, I mean that someone took the time and effort to examine individual sentences, to think about word choices, to create transitions between grafs, to describe things precisely. You know, writing! But a lot of what gets posted in the tech blogosphere doesn’t fit this definition of writing. It’s more in the tradition of the wire services, where speed rules over creativity.” – alexismadrigal

I was browsing Amazon this afternoon looking for some speakers for my office. Obviously – these Ultron Sonic‘s stood out.

They even look like they’d be great for when I’m on the go.

While I jest – I think this page is an excellent example of how integral getting both the product info & images correct is within Amazon.com. Oh sure – there’s a little bit of confusion on our (the human) end. A quick look around the rest of the page shows Amazon’s robots aren’t sure what to recommend or cross-sell.

“I’d also argue that Apple is breaking an implicit promise it made with buyers of the first 150 million plus number of iPhones, iPod Touchs and iPads. We wanted the next great personal computing platform, not Disney World in our pocket.”

Plus, just thinking about iOS’s hub-and-spoke-UI makes me tired.

Turns out MySQL’s InnoDB engine isn’t (by default) very enthusiastic to give back disk space if after mass deletions (say, a DELETE * or a TRUNCATE TABLE).

The fix is a little unsettling, but it’s also simple (and with a modestly size db – fast).

1. Back up the db (you should doing this anyway, but now is a nice time to do it again.)
mysqldump -uroot -p --opt --skip-lock-tables -f --quote-names --databases yourDB > yourDB.sql

2. Confirm you made a backup. Then drop the databases you just backed up (I told you there was an un-nerving part).
3. Shutdown the MySQL server – whatever your preferred method is. I like to click ‘stop’ in Webmin, maybe you like the command line.
4. Remove all innodb files (it’s pretty obvious which ones they are)
5. Restart the MySQL server
6. Reimport your database
   mysql -uroot -p < yourDB.sql

While you’re here – hop over to my.cnf and add innodb_file_per_table so next time OPTIMIZE TABLE will actually do what you expect it to do.