While my list is a little shorter than in years past, I’d be perfectly happy if I got to see all (or at least most) of these bands sometime in the next 365 days.
Who’s on your “must see” list this year?
You know, Sarah and I started talking four years ago today. And while I’ve managed to make this a rough four years for the both of us, I’m happy that we’ve stuck with it. We’re getting married in the Fall and I can’t wait to start the next phase of our life together.
In order to put the past behind us tho, I need to address what happened. So that’s the motivation behind this post.
Most of you don’t know the whole story of Sarah and I. And that’s either because I haven’t said anything about it or because I’ve only relayed half-truths or outright lies. If you knew the truth, I’m sure you may not have a high opinion of me. In fact, writing it out makes me feel pretty awful about the things that I’ve done.
So in order to set everyone straight, I’ll just say that if you’ve heard me say something disparaging about Sarah, forget it. Over the past four years, she’s always been a constant presence in my life. And she’s been willing to accept me back no matter how hard I’ve pushed her away.
I’d like to say that I didn’t push very hard, but that wouldn’t be true at all. I couldn’t commit to us for three out of those four years — and because of that, this last year has been hard. But we’ve made long strides. Hopefully, we’ll continue to make them.
I guess what I’m saying is, I’m sorry for the things I’ve done. And my only regret is not realizing all of the hurtful things I was doing sooner.
The next four years will be nothing like the last four tho. We’re going to build a life. A family. A home. Getting to do that with my best friend — and the most beautiful girl in the whole world — is all I could have ever asked for.
The only thing that makes me happier than knowing that this exists is knowing that it should be available for download in January of 2010. Anyone have any suggestions for good NES emulators for Linux?
I totally missed this video when it made the rounds months ago — but after watching it, I think Christopher R. Weingarten is my new hero. Well, maybe not my hero. But at least he’s my favorite music critic now.
If topics like crowdsourcing and its effects on criticism interest you at all, the video above is totally worth ten minutes of your time.
Switching Things Up
Yesterday, I quietly switched this site over from its old Apache server to the much more lightweight combination of nginx + XCache. As someone who has worked with Apache servers for roughly 14 years now, the thought of moving my personal site to a server environment that I didn’t know how to troubleshoot in great detail was terrifying. But you start becoming irrelevant the second you allow yourself to stop learning new things. So I took a play from the Ol’ Jack Burton playbook and said “what the hell?“.
Surprisingly, it’s still chugging along without any complaints. Most of the thanks for that goes to DreamHost‘s default nginx config and easy to follow tutorial tho.
All I really needed to do to get it going was:
And while that might seem like that list had a bunch of stuff in it, I can honestly say that it took no more than 30 minutes to make those changes.
The only weird thing that has happened so far is that it had a weird memory spike last night — but that dropped off this morning for no discernible reason. Since everything has been level after that, I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on my graphs and make sure it’s not a nightly thing…
P.S. Since I’ve never been one to leave “good enough” alone, I’m going to keep making tweaks (and maybe start piling on a few more active sites) to see what nginx can do. Expect more nerdy updates on this eventually.