Who dat? An evening with Harry Connick, Jr.

This evening my wife and I went to Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater to see Harry Connick, Jr. who’s touring in support of his new album, “Your Songs.” This was either the fourth or fifth time we’ve seen Harry in concert (we couldn’t remember exactly) and it was a great show as always.

The way the musicians were arranged on-stage helped showcase the three different styles of music we would be hearing. On the left were the strings for the orchestral numbers, in the center were the drums and bass, which combined with Harry on piano for the traditional jazz combo style, and then on the right were the trumpets, trombones, and saxophones for the big band numbers. For two hours he played a good mix of songs from the new CD and other recent releases plus a few of his trademark New Orleans jazz combo numbers. In addition to singing and playing the piano (of course) he also played trumpet and bass! “I suck” he joked, but of course he was pretty good.

During the breaks between sets he would talk and interact with the audience, which is always entertaining. He talked about how great it was for New Orleans to have the Saints as the Super Bowl champions (he apparently went to the game and got to meet a lot of the players afterwards). He jokingly talked about how 94% of the country doesn’t understand the “who dat?” chant and proposed (and briefly sang) a more understandable “who is that?” version. He told a funny story about his recent trip to the Grammys where he met Jennifer Hudson and had “her junk” on his arm during a photo shoot (“and she has a lot of junk!”). Another memorable  moment was when he said one of his daughter’s friends said he played “grandpa music” and the four women in his house would rather go see Kesha than him (which prompted  him to sing a few bars of “Tik Tok“). 🙂

Like my “Good Eats Live” experience last summer, however, there was a negative aspect to the show that will taint my memory of it … the super-annoying lady sitting directly behind us was a “woo girl.” Yes, at the beginning of every song she recognized, she had to shout “woooo!” at the top of her lungs in her ear-piercing, high-pitched voice. And not only that, she took advantage of silent moments to yell out song requests (“play ‘Come By Me!'”) or inappropriate comments (“Harry’s hot!”). By the end of the concert I was ready to turn around and strangle her. Arrrgh! There were a few other annoying hecklers in the crowd, but Harry dealt with them good naturedly (“it’s my name on the marquee, I’ll handle the comedy.”). Of course the theater had a strict policy on photographs and videotaping, but at the end of the show Harry posed for a picture with a lady in the front row and all of a sudden everyone had their cellphones and cameras out and were snapping photos. It must have been driving the ushers mad.

Overall, it was a great show and a good time. My favorite performance is still the one we saw in Cleveland during the “She”/”Star Turtle” tour when he was playing with the funk band in the mid-90s, but the jazz and big band shows are really good too and I’ll always go to see  him when I have the chance.

Fellow Ozians …

We went and saw “Wicked” this afternoon at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, using tickets we purchased about five months ago. It’s an incredible show and I highly recommend you see it if you have the chance!

This was the third time for me (once on Broadway with the original cast, here in Tampa during the first tour in 2007, and now again in 2010) but the first time my daughter had seen it, and she absolutely loved it. She’s actually falling asleep in her room right now listening to the soundtrack. 😉 She had read “The Wizard of Oz” (but actually hasn’t seen the movie) so it was fun to watch her put the pieces together as the story of Elphaba and Glinda unfolded on stage. I bought her the novel on which the musical is based (Gregory Maguire’s “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West“) a few months ago, but strangely she never got around to finishing it … I’ll be she does now, and I’d like to read it myself once I catch up on my current backlog.

This was the matinee show so a few of the understudies were performing the main parts. I guess I’m a little spoiled because after seeing Edina Menzel and Kristen Chenoweth belt out “Defying Gravity” on Broadway, the traveling company just didn’t pack the same punch. Not that they weren’t good! Here’s a funny note: Richard Kline is playing the role of the Wizard. I wouldn’t have recognized him except the playbill specifically mentioned he “is best known as Jack Tripper’s best friend, Larry Dallas on the classic sitcom ‘Three’s Company.'” That’s right, this guy is currently the Wizard of Oz. 😀

Another hard drive crash

What is it with me and hard drive crashes lately? First the drive in my Linux server dies, then this past Sunday the stock 250gb drive in my TiVo Series3 went bad.

The crash first manifested when the TiVo froze with a pinkish tinted picture on the TV. This has happened occasionally in the past, and the pink hue is usually an indicator of an HDMI signal issue so I pulled the plug and let the box reboot. Unfortunately, the TiVo got stuck on the “Welcome” screen and never went to the “Almost there” screen which pointed to a hard drive problem. I figured it was most likely the attached 1TB Western Digital Expander, so I unplugged the expander and let the box reboot again. Same problem, which confirmed it was the internal drive that was bad.

Luckily I had a spare 320gb SATA drive sitting around, so I figured I would just make a backup of the failed drive and restore it onto the spare. I pulled the TiVo out of the home theater stack, opened it up, and connected the drive to my PC. I tried using WinMFS to back up the drive, but discovered that since the drive was “married” to the expander, the software couldn’t make a backup without the expander attached as well. I don’t have an eSATA port on my PC (I’ve since ordered a cable from Monoprice) so that wasn’t going to be an option … I decided to just clone the drive. I connected the old drive and new drive to my PC and then booted the Ultimate Boot CD. From there, I used the EASEUS Disk Copy utility to perform a sector-by-sector copy of the 250gb drive to the 320gb drive.

After about two hours, the copy completed. I put the new drive back into the TiVo, crossed my fingers, and plugged it in. It got to the “Almost there” screen, which meant it was now loading from the hard drive. Then, the Green Screen of Death, which was actually a good sign. The disk copy had indicated 94 read errors, so I knew there were some corrupted sectors on the new drive. Since the GSOD was a sign that the TiVo was attempting to fix these problems, I let it go. Another two hours or so later, the box rebooted (again) and this time loaded all the way to TiVo Central, with all of my recordings preserved. Yes!

Unfortunately I’m missing out on the extra 70gb from the larger internal drive. According to the Drive Expansion FAQ, you can’t expand an internal drive when it’s married to another (the expander in my case). I guess at some point when there’s not a lot of recorded content that I care about, I’ll divorce the expander, clear everything, and then re-do the expansion so I’m able to use all 320gb. For now, though, the Series3 is back up and running.

Calvin’s Cleveland connection

How, after all these years of being a “Calvin & Hobbes” fan, did I never realize Bill Watterson is from Cleveland!? 😮

The Plain Dealer posted a brief interview with the cartoonist, thought to be his first since 1989. A C&H stamp will be issued by the post office later this year.

I loved reading “Calvin & Hobbes” growing up, and have all of the books, including the complete hardcover collection. I still read the strip daily and find that it has a whole new enjoyable meaning for me now that I’m a parent.

Two months with the iPhone

Steve Job’s recent announcement of the new iPad (really?) coincided closely with the two month anniversary of my getting an iPhone. So how have the past 8 weeks or so been?

I’m definitely better at typing on the virtual keyboard. I’m nowhere near as fast (or accurate) as I was on the Treo’s physical keyboard, but I can see a definite improvement over three months ago. Hopefully I’ll continue to get better as I learn more tricks. I’ve also adjusted to life without the clickwheel for basic iPod functions, which still accounts for the majority of my iPhone usage. The audio scrubber is frustratingly inaccurate, however, and I find it diffiicult to use. The voice commands come in handy while driving in the car so I’m finding myself using those more often. At home, we’ve got the Griffin PowerDock dual-charging station so we can keep my and my wife’s iPhones charged without having to pull out the little white charger blocks.

I originally complained about it not being easy to sync the iPhone with multiple PCs, mainly because that made it harder to download content while travelling with my laptop (my primary iTunes machine is my desktop at home). I found that you can download new podcasts directly from the device, which is cool … unless you happen to be using AT&T’s 3G data service instead of WiFi (see the screenshot to the left). No downloading new podcasts while driving in the car. 🙁 To make it easier to sync files (or photos), I’m using DropBox on my PCs and the iPhone. I just move the photos from my camera roll into the DropBox folder using the app and it’s automatically synchronized to all of my other devices running the DropBox client.

I used to carry a 2gb USB thumb drive around that contained my portable apps and personal documents, but why continue to do that when I’ve got extra room on my 32gb iPhone? I purchased Avatron’s Air Sharing application (screenshot to the right) which for $3 turns your iPhone into a wireless storage device. I can map my iPhone as a drive on my Windows PC (or connect via the browser) and then use my regular synchronization software to copy files back and forth. Yes, DropBox can do the same basic thing, for free, but I’m not comfortable storing some of my personal documents on DropBox’s servers so Air Sharing lets me eliminate that middleman (besides, I’ve got this stuff backed up to my encrypted Amazon S3 account through Jungledisk, no need to duplicate them out in the cloud again). Air Sharing also supports viewing most document types like Word and Excel, PDF, etc.

If you live in a multi-iPhone household and need to keep a synchronized shopping list, you must purchase GroceryIQ. For just $1 you get a full-featured list app that supports multiple stores, aisle and category customization, barcode scanning, and list sharing. If I purchase something on the list and mark it off, it will disappear from the app on my wife’s iPhone so we don’t end up both buying the item. By customizing the aisle order for each store, our grocery shopping is more efficient: no more back-and-forth in the store because we forgot an item that was two aisles back. Everything is listed in the order you go through the store. I was a little disappointed that the recent version includes little ads in your shopping list, but they’re not that intrusive and heck, it was only $1 and that’s well worth the features you get.

i.tv is neat little app (free) that turns your iPhone into a connected TV guide. You can search TV listings for your lineup, see what’s currently on and what other people are watching. What I like, though, are the TiVo features (of course!). After linking your tivo.com account you can schedule upcoming recordings directly from your iPhone. There’s also a feature that turns your iPhone into a WiFi-enabled remove control for your  TiVo (Series3 models only). Yes, I can change the channel on my TiVo in the family room from across the house (except you can’t control TV functions like volume, so I still need the remote extender for that). Fun to play with.

Other than those additions (plus a few free games), I seem to be past the initial “must-download-and-try-everything!” stage of installing apps. My list seems to have stabilized around 5 pages of icons, which I try to have organized by type: most-used, utilities, games, work-related, misc., etc. Unfortunately the lack of real customization features on the springboard makes it hard to really categorize the icons so I’m trying to learn to live with that. 🙂 It’ll also be interesting to see which (if any) new features introduced in iPhone OS 3.2 (running on the iPad) make it into the iPhone itself in the next few months.

Recovered from The Crash

After a few evenings’ work, I’ve recovered from The Crash and have my server back up and running!

The problem started last week on Thursday when I found the server was not responding to pings, none of the services were available, and the fans were cranking at 100%. The server is headless, so I hooked up a monitor to see if anything strange was going on. Unfortunately, there was no video signal … and even the “raising elephants” magic key sequence didn’t do anything. My only option was to hard power off the box and restart it, at which point it seemed back to normal except none of the system logs showed anything that would indicate what the problem was.  A similar thing had also occured back in December while we were up in Cleveland which I had just written off as a random crash, but now this was the second time. I should have known better that Linux just doesn’t crash 😉 and sure enough, the box was locked up again Friday morning.

That evening, I pulled the server out of the closet and hooked it up at my desk along with monitor and keyboard so I could interact with it directly instead of over an SSH connection. I figured maybe this way I could see if anything strange was happening that wasn’t being reflected in the logs. It all seemed normal until finally I saw this:

Oh oh … that couldn’t be good. ata1.00 was obviously referring to the hard drive. A quick search on that { UNC } code showed “Uncorrectable error – often due to bad sectors on the disk” so it became apparent that the drive was failing. Presumably there was some bad area of the disk and when the server accessed that area it just locked up. At this point I tried running a disk check and started getting all sorts of I/O errors. Rather than push the drive to complete failure with the scan, I decided to rebuild the server on a spare drive and restore from backup.

The failing drive was an old 120gb and all I had around were older IDE 20gb, 30gb, and 40gb drives (no SATA controller in my “server”). I wasn’t using all 120gb, so moving to a smaller drive was an acceptable solution. My first thought was to make an image of the failing drive using EASEUS  Todo Backup which works great for imaging Windows PCs even when moving to smaller drives. Unfortunately the software doesn’t recognize the Linux file system so it could only do a sector-by-sector copy, which means I could only copy the image to another identical 120gb drive. With the image copy option off the table, I decided to just do a clean install of Karmic on the spare 30gb drive and then restore what I could from my backups. I hadn’t done a clean install of Linux since I put this server together back in 2007, so why not? I spent the rest of weekend re-installing and re-configuring packages to put the server back the way I had it. Luckily I keep good notes of all the changes I make, so between that, being able to pull files (like the MySQL databases and configuration files) from the 120gb drive connected via a USB enclosure, and having the rest of the important stuff backed up on my two NAS devices and in the cloud (via Jungledisk), the restore process was relatively straightforward with no data lost.

Sunday night, I moved the rebuilt server back to its home in the closet. After a quick check to make sure everything was running, I went to bed. The next morning, I heard a loud fan noise coming out of the closet … the server had crashed again! 😮 Same symptoms, not good. I had to get to work so I just shut the server down and left. Monday evening, I started it up again and logged in via SSH (remember, it’s headless when it’s in the closet). As before, there was nothing in the logs to indicate a cause of the crash. The difference now, though, was that the system seemed to be crashing faster. After just a few minutes, it would be locked up like before the disk crash. So I pulled it out of the closet again and hooked it up to a keyboard and monitor so I could watch it crash first-hand … and it didn’t crash.

Google to the rescue! I found this post that seemed to describe my exact problem: a headless server running the latest 2.6.31.x kernel crashed after just 10 minutes. The cause? The screensaver! Or, rather, since the server isn’t running X windows, the screen blanker that turns off the monitor after 10 minutes. Apparently due to some bug in the interaction between the kernel and the basic video driver, when the system tried to turn off the monitor when no monitor was attached, the system would just hang. This is why the system was just fine as I worked on it all weekend, but then crashed as soon as I moved it back into the closet and it was headless again. I added the suggested init script for disabling the screen blanking to my system, rebooted, and waited. 11 minutes later, the server was still running. Eureka!

The server has now been stable for a few days, so I finally seem to be past the problems. What bugs me now is the similarity of the two crashes. Obviously, according to my diagnostic tools, the original hard drive was failing in a bad way. Is it just a coincidence that the second video/screen blanking-related crash exhibited the same symptoms as the failing disk? That seems suspicious, but the server was running for a lot longer in between crashes, not failing after just 10 minutes of uptime. I was using a slightly different version of the 2.6.31 kernel on the old drive (I’m using 2.6.32 now) so maybe it was due to that different revision.

At any rate, after all of that, the server is finally back. In addition to giving me the “opportunity” to rebuild the server from scratch, this incident also helped to confirm that I’ve got a decent backup strategy in place. Sure, it took me a few days (instead of hours) to get everything back online, which wouldn’t be acceptable in a business situation, but at least I had zero data loss!

Crash!

The hard drive in my server crashed! I’ve been having problems over the past few days where Ubuntu was just locked up and the server was unpingable. I’m trying to make a backup image of the drive before it completely dies, but for now I’ve got some of the site back up and running with last week’s backup on a spare drive and a clean Ubuntu install. Not everything is back, so there might be some broken links and stuff generally not working correctly.

Fun! 🙁

Finally back to normal (temperatures)

After almost two solid weeks of temperatures in the 40s (and below freezing in some areas, apparently we brought it back with us from Ohio), our normal Florida “winter” weather returned today. Yes, it was finally back in the 70s … I was able to eat lunch outside in the sun and even cook up some chicken on the grill for dinner out on the lanai. I saw a lot of brown grass and dying plants on the way home from work today. We’ll be hearing a lot of about the long-lasting effects of that weather on the state’s produce and wildlife in the days to come, I’m sure.

Happy New Year! A new decade begins …

Wow, 2010. Hard to believe that 10 years ago we were worried about Y2K! 😉

For New Year’s Eve we did our family tradition of fondue for dinner (we went out to The Melting Pot this year instead of cooking it ourselves). Then we headed over to First Night in downtown St. Petersburg, which we had never been to before. It’s basically just a big outdoor fair spread across several blocks along the bay with activities for the kids (like glice skating!), music, food, and fireworks every hour until the big show at midnight. We stayed for a few hours and then headed home to watch the ball drop on TV.

Back in Florida

I know it sounds a little harsh, but after spending the past few days in chilly, snowy Ohio for the holidays, we’re glad to be back in Florida.

We spent Christmas Eve day doing some last minute shopping and preparations, which included cooking lasagna (in our hotel room) to take to dinner at my aunt’s place.

Christmas Day was relatively relaxing. After church and an early lunch a few of us went to see “The Princess and the Frog,” which my daughter enjoyed (it was a very different type of Disney princess movie … I particularly enjoyed the musical score and the trumpet-playing alligator). We cooked Christmas dinner at my brother’s and sister-in-law’s place and spent the rest of the day with the immediate family.

On the 26th, we had a family photo taken at a local Portrait Innovations studio. The place was pretty small, and apparently had a 40-person occupancy limit so they were asking people to wait outside (in the cold!) until they were called. Overall it was a poorly organized way to get a picture taken, but the end result was worth it. We spent that evening at another aunt’s house to visit with my mom’s side of the family.

Sunday? More visiting with family, of course! That’s also when the real winter weather started to move in. By the time we left my sister’s place that evening a good half-inch or so had fallen (and it was still coming down) so my daughter had her first experience with a snowbrush as she helped clean off some of the cars.

The drive back to the hotel was slow due to the deteriorating road conditions. Of course, we had to take advantage of the snow once we got back to the hotel: my daughter and I had a serious snowball fight, which was a lot of fun (mostly for her), and she got to make a decent snow angel.

Luckily, when we woke up early this morning to head to the airport, it was just freezing cold and no longer snowing. The crews had done their job overnight and the major roads were clear. Once we dropped off the rental car and got into the airport, though, the “fun” began. Thanks to the two Northwest Airlines incidents, security at the airport was crazy! You’d think the airport would have been prepared, but the line was a  mess: it switched back on itself several times so it was almost impossible to find the end. Plus it went past all the other lines to check-in so people were constantly cutting through with their baggage, causing general confusion. 40 minutes later we were finally through, without major incident (although once we got to our gate and settled down my wife realized she had accidentally left an opened bottle of apple juice in her carry-on that went through the x-ray machine and wasn’t caught. Oops!).

We had no return flight issues except for the slight delay for de-icing. Once back in Florida and the 60-degree sunny weather, we heard from my sister that it really started to get bad after we left, so we had made it out just in time. To celebrate being home, we had lunch on the deck outside at a Bahama Breeze near the airport. Ahhh. And yeah, we rubbed it in for the family up north by sending a photo. Love you guys! 🙂