An upgrade issue left me unable to attend DevOps Days Boston, which bummed me out a little bit, but I at least ended up selling my ticket to somebody else.

At work somebody introduced me to Sinatra, which is a Ruby DSL for building simply dynamic web sites and Heroku, a service for hosting Ruby web apps.. I put this together with Markdown (which I discovered doing the Maven book) and created http://notes.buildndeploy.com/, which I’m using to write up and share notes I make about various languages, technologies and tools.

I ended up registering www.buildndeploy.com and moving that site from WordPress to Posterous since they don’t charge you for custom domain names. I’ve also been getting rid of domain names I no longer need and moving the ones I’m keeping to keep to DNSimple, a cheaper and infinitely better alternative to GoDaddy. Between the notes site and the main site I’ve gotten a decent amount done with this effort.

My mountain bike map of Graham Hills Park was finally signed off on and is now availale: http://wmba.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/graham-hills-park.pdf

I’ve been steadily saving for a new iMac but slowed down my savings just a little bit when rumors started popping up about them coming out with new models in June or July. I had originally targetted forgetting one in April. Lately the buzz has been saying late April/early May. Either way, I should have enough put aside to get a nice iMac.

In the middle of March Kim and I attended PAX East with her sister, brother-in-law and my friend Dan and his girlfriend (also named Kim). The highlight of the show was seeing Jonathan Coulton play which really got me thinking about writing music again. I’ve started noodling around on my guitar more and recording some ideas in the back room of the apartment, which I’ve been doing a lot of clean up on.

JoCo’s lyrics got me thinking about opening myself up to writing about what I know more. I also realized that while I’ve treated programming as something I should always try and read and learn more about, I’ve never treated music that way – I always felt like songs should come from some inherent, untrained magical ability. I realized this was a stupid notion and picked up the book Writing Better Lyrics, as well as a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. The thesaurus has been pretty neat and interesting to flip through. I’ve been making an effort to do Object Writing every morning as suggested by the lyrics book. I’m about 12 days in with a couple of missed days here and there. I’ve also been working on “worksheets” for my songs to try and cultivate more lyrics and ideas for them.

Just today I dropped off my electric guitar and bass at the new guitar shop in Tarrytown called Rock Island Sound to get them set up and have their electronics checked out. I also put two other guitars on consignment since I never use them. That helps clear out the back room some more and hopefully bring in a little extra cash. I might use that to get one of the pretty guitars they have there though…

Yesterday I put a lot of time into rearranging our bedroom. I moved the bed to the back of the room by the windows instead of off to the side. This makes the room and space for each of us symmetrical. I also got rid of the big computer desk I’ve had for probably 10 years. I want something simpler and easier to move. The big desk had to be taken completely apart just to move it to another room. I’m not interested in dealing with it anymore.

I’m still using Google Voice for texting but am pretty disappointed in the iPhone App for it. It’s always hanging and crashing and the UI can be quite flakey fairly often. I also ended up going over my new data limit this month for the iPhone so it almost negated the savings on the cheaper text and data plan. This month should be better.

Another daily (workday) habit I’ve been doing is reading a card from the Agile in a Flash card deck and reflecting on it via Twitter. I’ve even engaged with the author himself, Tim Ottinger, on Twitter, asking questions, getting feedback and generally being challenged to think more and do them each day.

In the money/budget category… well, my budget was a little shaky towards the end of the month, but overall I think it was okay. One of the smarter buying choices I made this month was passing on getting an AirPort Extreme and just buying a NetGear WAP using the Best Buy gift certificate my brother got me for Christmas. (Update: The day after this post I saw this article which some might be interested in: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/04/is-the-airport-extreme-worth-the-price/)

I only managed to get out on my mountain bike twice this month, and that was two days in the same weekend. The weather was less than agreeable in the beginning of the month but there were a few days here and there I should’ve gotten out on my bike but just didn’t. I need to step that up in April. Getting my gear in order and ready to go (especially for evenings) would be a big help. I’ve been considering thinking about getting an actually single speed mountain bike and a couple of friends have suggested getting a 29er, so I’ve been looking at bikes likes the Trek/Fisher Marlin Single Speed. No solid plans yet on that front though.

The lack of riding this month also means a lack of losing any weight :-/

The game designing and mapping have taken a back seat lately, so I ended up removing those categories from my Google Reader account. It was becoming a burden to keep up with them so I decided it was best to just remove them. Another small amount of simplification I’ve made in my online life is shutting off email notifications from Facebook. I’ve found this helps make it less distracting and results in less email to clean up after.

I was thinking this was another dud month as far as progress and accomplishments are concerned, but after seeing all I’ve written about above I feel pretty good about it.

I’m still mountain biking and still loving it. I’ve been trying to ride at least once a week. Evening rides are harder now, at least if I want to ride in the woods but I’m hoping to join a night ride later this week. I think I’ll need to pick up a better light though.

This past weekend I rode twice – once with the NYC MTB meetup group and once by myself. The Saturday ride with the group was excellent. We spent time practicing various technical bits at Sprain Ridge Park and a few of us even went for another ride afterwards. I brought my video camera and my new GorillaPod camera stand and took a bunch of footage of us.

The previous weekend I also rode with the NYC MTB group, that time in a long ride around Lewis Morris Park in Morristown, New Jersey. I really had to push myself that day, especially when I decided to go for a second loop with the group. I was definitely the slowest of the group but I managed to stay not too far behind. We did a bit of practicing on this ride as well, though not as much as this past weekend.

The weekend before that was a ride in Mianus River Park which was probably one of the best ride I’ve been on. That park is really beautiful and the guy leading the ride took us on a really nice route through Mianus. I’m glad I have it stored in my Garmin GPS.

Back in September I made the trek up to New Paltz, NY for mountain biking festival at Lake Minnewaska. I was initially disappointed because they had no single track but after seeing the following view my opinion changed completely.

And while I’m throwing all this video at your I should mention my friend Will’s new band
Gotham City Mashers. Here’s my favorite song of theirs so far:

You can see their entire recent gig at Don Hill’s:

The opener was The Anderson Council, who’s entire set I also taped:

I really like your site and the services it offers. I really love music and appreciate finding people with similar tastes, reading up on bands I like, expanding my own library by finding other bands through your site and just letting people know what I’ve been listening to.

But lately I’ve been experiencing a bug that’s been annoying the hell out of me: after scrobbling my latest songs I check my Recently Listened Tracks and find songs show up twice or more when I know I only listened to that song once at that time.

I thought maybe the problem was with the scrobbler so I updated to the latest version and took some screenshots of what it was doing. It showed each song only once so all looked well there.

When I checked my recent tracks on the web site I saw duplicate entries for a number of bands.

The biggest culprit seems to be Hammock. I’ve seen their tracks show up over 20 times on my playlist at the same exact minute.

The only thing I can offer about Hammock is that I fall asleep to them most every night, but definitely not on infinite loop. But this problem also happens with other bands, so I don’t think it’s Hammock specific.

So my questions for you are?

Are these songs showing up twice in the database table (or whatever) for my “song plays”?

When I try to delete one of the dupes, both/all entries end up getting deleted. I don’t see this until I refresh the page though. From poking around your code I see the following:

• The HTML for the dupes show the same exact JavaScript code for deleting the dupe tracks: rmrecenttrack(this, 21617457, 1238250572)
• The rmrecentrack method is defined as such: rmrecenttrack(link, trackid, listendate)

So both the trackid and listendate are the same. That explains why they both end up getting deleted – they are in fact the same entry. But if they have the same exact listendate… why are they showing up multiple times?

My only guess is that you have duplicate entries in your database, or whatever is feeding your view code is generating duplicate entries. I wonder where this is coming from if the scrobbler is showing a single entry for these songs. I’d love to help you figure this out.

Are these dupe entries also counting as duplicate plays towards the play count for that song/artist?

This is the only answer I really care about. I don’t want these dupe entries messing up my play counts, especially when a song can be duped up to 20 times. I suppose I could do some more digging on this but I’ve already spent an hour looking into this. It seems to be happening to others as I’ve found other people complaining about duplicate entries in the last.fm forums.

I know I don’t pay for your service (I’m sure you’re doing alright on ads, yea?) but would appreicate knowing if you’re aware of the problem and if you have figured out the cause and know how to fix.

I continued looking and came across The New York Composers Meetup Group. The meeting for that night was full as well but I decided to join the group anyways. Within a few minutes I got an email from the organizer telling me to come by since they usually have a few no-shows anyways. I grabbed some dinner at Pret and then headed down to the meet up location by taxi. I got there a little early so I did some reading while I waited for people to show up.

The meeting eventually started and there was a wide variety of people who showed up. The format for the night was to listen to pieces by a few people, get a little lesson on digital recording, and then do some more listening. Everybody’s songs were good and some people were very impressive, either in their music or their lyrics. During one of the breaks the people next to me struck up a conversation with me (the cast is an easy conversation piece) and I learned that the girl is a composer and the guy is a Ruby on Rails developer. I didn’t get to play the song I wanted to share but after hearing some other pieces I already started to critique my own piece.

I left the meet up at the same time the couple did and they invited me out to get something to eat. We took a few taxis and eventually ended up at a diner where we had a great conversation about meaningfulness, jobs, careers, callings, doing good things, music, programming, psychology and a bunch of other stuff. They picked up the bill, refused to let me pay (the cast really works!) and helped me flag down a taxi to send me on my way home.

All in all it was a surprisingly joyful night. And I even got some new friends out of it.

Next Thursday the cast is supposed to come off but I’m going to probably be back in the bracing boot. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to put weight on it yet. But at least it means things are getting better. I’m just really eager to be able to drive but realize that I’ve got to take it slow.

This Wednesday is the next New York City Boardgames & Cardgames Group meetup and I’m uber-excited for that. I’m planning to bring Robo Rally and Abduction this time and have been reviewing the rules in anticipation. My new friends from the composers group may be joining me as well.

• The Album Leaf
• Band of Horses
• Bleu
• Count Zero
• Hammock
• Jackdaw4
• Linus of Hollywood
• Loscil
• The Nines
• Pugwash
• Sugarbomb

It’s been a whirlwind of a Christmas and it’s not even Christmas Day. Well, I’m writing this at 12:42am on December 25th, but all of this has happened before midnight.

To start things off, I bought Christine an iPhone for Christmas and was dying to give it to her since the day it arrived. I begged her to let me give her a present early but, her being the tradionalist, she wouldn’t let me. So as the weeks unfolded and bad luck kept striking her phone I secretly cheered inside, knowing that I would soon be able to solve all her problems. Well, at least any problems an iPhone could solve. During the last few weeks the battery lock broke on her phone, the front display cracked and she accidentally washed it with her pants. As an added “bonus”, her MP3 player started acting funky, eventually just locking up indefinitely.

The phone washing incident took place a few days before Christmas, leaving her without a working cellphone, so I just HAD to give her her present early. She suspected I was getting her a phone but thought it was going to be the LG enV like I have. She was excited to get an iPhone, but weary of dropping it. I just made her promise me she wouldn’t wash it.

Christmas Eve morning I talked to my mom who informed me that my aunt (my dad’s sister) was rushed to hospital the night before and is now in ICU. They were heading over there at the moment after having just visited my Uncle. We always go there on Christmas Day, but things were likely to change with her in the hospital.

Adding to the “excitement” of Christmas Eve, I called Christine to find out that the house she was pet sitting at was full of smoke. Turns out the furnace was filling the house with smoke and setting off the fire alarm. This resulted in the fire department showing up and then somebody coming to fix the furnace. Eventually she made her way back home for a little bit where we had lunch and then exchanges Christmas presents. She prefers to open them on Christmas Day, but with our hectic schedules it just wasn’t possible.

The next person to get an iPresent was my Uncle – my mom’s brother. He was rushed to the emergency room a few months ago due to either a heart attack or a stroke (I think they’re still not sure what it was) and for about the last month has been in a nursing home going through rehabilitative therapy. His main source of entertainment has been a small TV and with him being a uber music lover, I knew he must be starving for some music. So after careful consideration I decided to get him the iPod Nano. It’s big enough for him to see, has a screen and is small enough that it should survive falls that the regular iPod probably can’t take. It’s also not as expensive, so won’t be as big as a hit if it should happen to “disappear” at the nursing home.  Needless to say, he LOVES it and has been telling everybody about it.

After visiting my Uncle, my brother came over and brought all the presents from my parents and himself. I started preparing for dinner and my parents were soon at the apartment. Right before my brother arrived I had setup up Miis on the Wii for my mom and dad just in case they wanted to try some Wii games. I wasn’t hopefuly, considering all the traveling and hospital visits but I set them up just in case. I’m glad I did.

I started my parents off with a little Wii Sports Tennis. Mom tried it first and picked it up very quickly. My dad was making fun of her a bit, so I forced the Wii Remote on him as well. They had fun and got a bit competitive about it. After a few matches they gave Bowling a try, but the spaghetti was ready so we put the game on pause. Dinner was alright, but my parents were so hungry that they weren’t being very picky. I made spaghetti and my brother made garlic bread.

Once dinner was over, mom kicked into mother mode and insisted on washing the dishes, even though we have a dishwasher (and no drying rack). Mean while in the living room my brother set my dad up with Wii Sports Golf. Dad caught on really quick and ended up doing pretty damn well for his first try, even on the expert course.

I figure everybody would be eager to start opening the presents but I guess they were really enjoying the gaming. Next up we played some Scene It: Lights, Camera, Action! on the 360.  We played the Party Mode for a while. After about 20 minutes of that we switched to Smarty Pants on the Wii – a game Christine had gotten me for Christmas. My mom really got a kick out of this one, especially when our characters were dancing on the screen. It’s a pretty good game and I liked the cards you could get to help yourself or throw other people off. My brother ended up winning both Scene It and Smarty Pants.

Finally it was time to open the presents. This year I took a little bit of a risk and bought each family member a present they didn’t necessarily ask for but would hopefully like a lot.

• Mom’s present was a white Nintendo DS Lite. This was inspired by a post on Penny Arcade where one of them was talking about his grandma has a DS Lite on her shelf at home. My mom likes card games and puzzles games (like Sudoku) and, since she’s been doing a lot of traveling lately, I thought this would be a fun way for her to pass the time.
• For my Dad, I got an iPod Classic with an 80GB drive. My dad loves music and I thought this would be a great way for him to have all his CDs available for listening to anytime, anywhere.
• My brother got a new digital camera from Canon. The last year or so he’s been complaining about his old camera, so I figured it was time for a replacement

Soon I was jumping back and forth between my mom and dad, showing them how to use their new digital toys. There was even a moment where all you could hear was the pushing of buttons as everybody played with their new digital toys.

The final gift for my parents was a pair of pictures my brother and I had gotten taken and framed of the two of us – something my mom has been asking for for a while now. They can bring these back to their house in South Carolina so they remember what we look like.

Later, Christine was able to stop by after running around to her own family and dog walking/sitting responsibilities. She opened a bunch of presents from my family and eventually it was time for everybody to go home. I had debated going back with Christine to where she was dog sitting, but since I was tired and had to go other places in the morning, I decided to stay home.

That is until Christine called me from Connecticut to tell me she had gotten a flat tire and forgotten to bring nice clothes for the next day. So I packed up an outfit for her and made the drive to CT to change the tire for her. It wasn’t until half way there that I remember she had AAA, who could’ve changed the tire for her.

The guitar comes in two pieces this time around – the neck and the body, unlikes Guitar Hero 2 which came all as one piece. I’ve noticed some flakiness in the frets while I was playing. I would hold down certain frets and the game would not respond, even in places like the menu. Through some experimenting I’m thinking that the probem has to do with the fact that the neck and the body are two separate parts and the metal pins inside the neck are not fully hitting the metal contacts inside the body of the guitar. One of the quick experiments I did was holding down two frets and then shaking the neck a bit which cause the frets to turn on and off as the contacts inside moved around.

I never had this problem with the single-piece guitar. Is anybody else experiencing this?

Update – It seems I’m not the only person experiencing this:

1. http://lawofthegame.blogspot.com/2007/10/guitar-hero-iii-problems-with.html
2. http://thesomewhatmanlynerd.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/do-not-buy-a-guitar-hero-iii-bundle/
3. http://www.guitarhero.com/forums/14/forum_topics/830
4. http://forums.gameinformer.com/gi/board/message?board.id=microsoft&message.id=151724#M151724
5. http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38538

Update 2 – I tried a few things last night and it seems to have resulted in solving the above problem:

1. Re-seated the neck into the body. When I originally slid the neck into the body, I held the little unlock switch open. I guess it’s better to not do that and the neck snap into the body. The neck feels a lot more solid in the body now.
2. Pushed on the pins inside the body. Maybe this loosened them up or fixed any stuck ones.

I played last night and didn’t notice any flakiness, even when I purposely gave the neck a wiggle while I was playing. I want to give it a few more days though before I believe the issue is resolved.

I hope to upload some more videos from the show soon.