directorcommentary | jasonbentley.org

Dig it! I got my Cafepress.com store set up and my first round of shirts is up for sale! More stuff to come in the next few days.

http://www.jasonbentley.org/mobfront

So Simba's gaining weight back. Lookin' much fuller. His nose is better, too, though the flash does him no favors.

Now we can begin picking up the pieces.

Oh, hey, the tsunami telethon is on now on NBC and all of NBC's sister networks. They're making mp3s of the songs performed on the show at www.connect.com, with the proceeds for the download going to the tsunami effort.

1-800-HELP-NOW.


- Morgan Freeman makes an appropraitely ernest appeal.
- Madonna sings "Imagine" with her typically Michiganian phrasing.
- Clint Eastwood whispers.
- Halle Berry talks about Fear and Loss and Dispair (capital letters included)
- Maroon 5 does a bossa-nova via Christoper Cross thing.
- OMG! Celebrities are on phones! Leonardo DiCaprio and Cindy Crawford are waiting to take your call!
- Norah Jones is singing a rather nice song, but like her last album, it's totally on quaaludes.
- Every time I see Chris Matthews I think of the guy on SNL that does Chris Matthews.
- DeNiro! Not squinting and looking shifty!
- Annette Bening and Quicy Jones are on phones!
- Noah Wyle and Quentin Tarantino too!
- I guess Jay Leno is the most.
- Meg Ryan makes an appeal with good hair.
- Andy Garcia lookin' older. :-)
- BRIAN WILSON! BRIAN WILSON! Brian sings "Love 'n Mercy." He lost his cellist. :-( He ended his set with "We love you, Marcus."
- It's Rob Lowe on phones next to that guy from Minority Report and Boomtown.
- Bill O'Reilly. Grrrrrrrr.
- Gloria Estefan doing something mellow faaaar away from "Conga."
- Kevin Spacey reading more flowery dialog.
- Mary J. Blige doin' her thang. I like her, but meh.
- Meg Ryan, Danny DeVito, Vin Diesel, and Ben Affleck on phones.
- Sarah Maclachlan sings a song I recognize but I can't name.
- Tim Robbins looks spacier than Kevin but better in a brown shirt than I would.
- Banda Aceh :-( What a mess.
- Oh, hey...that's James Cromwell's voice. He was Zephram Cochrane in Star Trek and Lewis' dad in Revenge of the Nerds and the farmer in Babe. In other words...A LEGEND.
- Brad Pitt and Jane Seymour on phones.
- Wow. $3000 for a working phone signed by all the phonecelebs.
- Robert Downey, Jr. Dude. :-)
- Awww...you can download all the songs from the performance on connect.com: COOL. You have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer: LAME! LAME! LAME!
- Elton John wears a tasteful wig, but a wig nonetheless - and sings "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me." *ahem*
- James Woods on phones.
- Goldie Hawn has lots of hair and looks better than the horror pictures they show in the tabloids.
- They're showing the Digital Globe sattelite shots a lot.
- Josh Groban. Why must the survivors suffer this? ;-)
- There seems to be a lot of news about how the aid is reaching a critical mass. I wonder if this telethon will suffer as a result?
- I wonder where the word aftermath came from?
- Natalie Portman! Fresh from Naboo!
- Wow! Stevie Wonder looking about as good as Eddie Murphy does now too. Wow, he doesn't have the energy in his voice anymore. Yeek...this performance isn't very good. And it's going on for a week. I dunno who the girl he's singing with is. Is that the girl from American Idol? Clutching your earpiece can't save you! Aw, well, it's for a good cause.
- Gary Sinise on phonez.
- Matt Lauer. He looks better now with more hair. I sound really shallow.
- John Mayer doing his Dave Matthews thing. The sound on this show isn't very good.
- Don Cheadle on phones!
- I like that they're keeping the sets simple. It looks like small studios.
- They're also keeping the show moving along at a clip too. Why can't the Oscars be like this?
- Some guy just gave $1 million.
- Renée Zellweger with black hair!!!
- Drew Barrymore looks like she just fell outta bed.
- Whoa! Another rapper is using samples from "True" by Spandau Ballet and it's not PM Dawn! That's just odd. It sounds like the chorus is "Hey...NBC..." but they wouldn't be *that* vain would they? :-)
- Wow, they cut to Hugh Grant in London and it goes immediately into that Euro video look. I like that look.
- Roger Waters! Wow... with all white hair. Doin' "Wish You Were Here" with Eric Clapton.
- Country stars are looking a lot like gay porn stars these days. And he's singing about San Francisco. Hmmmm.
- Kelsey Grammer and James Caan on phones.
- Oooo. Will, from Will 'n Grace.
- Annie Lennox, rocking the house as always.
- Damn Michael Douglas is lookin' old.
- Lenny Kravitz performs Let Love Rule on an acoustic guitar. Nice.
- Nicholas Cage and Jamie Foxx on phones.
- Uma Thurman looks awesome.
- Ohhhhh, Johnny Depp is there. Sessy.
- Matt Damon and Ben Afflect appearing together again. Mrrr.
- Diana Ross. Oh yeah. She's had work done.

So today in the mail a surprise package arrived from my friend Doron in New York, and what was in it? A CNN Anderson Cooper 360 thermal coffee mug! Because Doron rules like that! Thanks, dawg! :-)

Behold!

The poor bahstehds.

Update #5: 1:58 pm: approaching 24 hours of downtime... *sigh* We're still at it. We'll be doing a full write-up when we're done, including what we'll be changing to make sure verify/restore operations don't take so long if this is ever necessary again. The good news is the databases already migrated to InnoDB did fine. The bad news (obviously) is that our verify/restore plan isn't fast enough. And also that some of our machine's storage subsystems lie. Anyway, we're still at it... it's long because we're making sure to back up even the partially out of sync databases that we're restoring, just in case we encounter any problems down the road with the restored copy, we'll be able to merge them. And unfortunately backups and networks are too slow.

I have houseguests for the weekend, friends from out of town here for Further Confusion. We're watching Star Trek: Nemesis. And wow, what a lame movie this is. I read this is the last of the Next Gen crew movies, and what a weenie note to go out on. The evil aliens even steal Picard again. You'd figure he'd be, like, "stop doing that!"

The guy playing "Shinzon," aka the Young Picard, is a total neo-maxi-zoondweebie. :-)

So check out this mp3...it's "Sous Leau A Pied" by Jiva, the first in a series of Creative Commons licenced mp3s that I'm gonna post in the upcoming months in this directory: http://www.jasonbentley.org/cc-mp3. It's very bleepy 'n cool.

I'll post license information at http://www.jasonbentley.org/cc-mp3/cc-license.txt

Dig it!