I worked quite a lot over the last few days. Normally I really don't like crazy overtime, having had a very bad experience with it at Origin. Although we haven't really committed to show anything (and I'm not presenting a paper), I do feel as though our demo should be strong for OSCon. I'm sorry I have been a bit hard to reach because when I'm not working, I'm sleeping. I'll still be working for some of this weekend, and in keeping with recently-established tradition, when I'm not working or sleeping I'll be driving.

As soon as this server upgrade is over, I'm going to have a nice, long contemplation (along with my coworkers) of how things went wrong, and hopefully this crunch will be an isolated occurrence.

I've lost some data on my LJ. The last entry, in particular, and two comments associated with it were particularly annoying to lose, since I'd deleted my offline backups recently, assuming that LJ was never going to lose anything.

My support request is here, and a lj_maintenance entry detailing the fix that didn't work for me is here.

Let this be a lesson to you all: backups are not a way to restore your data, they are a magic talisman against data loss.

I'll start posting these to the community blog in the future, but since more people read this one right now, I'll put it here. Since to some extent our process is public, and I get a lot of questions, I feel like I should mention what I'll be focusing on in the coming week. I hope that those of you looking into the fishbowl find this interesting ;-).

This week I am endeavoring to get out of the process business. Over the last month or two, I've been drawing up schedules for the team, trying to get us (and myself) organized. While I seem to be able to imagine the process quite well, I'm not organized enough to pull it off, and my coding has been slipping behind while I'm doing this. So, I'm turning as much of it as I can over to Mark, our new "marketing" guy. While this is slightly out-of-scope for someone doing general marketing, it should give him the necessary insight into how the product works to describe it clearly to our audience.

So, that's what I won't be working on. What I will be working on is our scalability solution, so that we can start adding hardware when we get more customers. While simple in principle, I've been banging my head against it, with Allen's help, for several weeks now. I think I will be able to finish it up this week, if everything goes well.

Whether everything usually goes well or not is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I went to the mall to price some noise-cancelling headphones. WOW. Those are some absurdly expensive little toys. I still think I want some, but it's going to require a little more careful consideration.

The ideal headset for me would be around-the-ear, collapsable, USB, linux- and mac-compatible (e.g. a standard USB audio device, not some crazy third-party thing that requires drivers), with active noise cancelling earpieces, a noise cancelling microphone, and of course standard features like in-line volume control and a microphone mute switch that doesn't produce a deafening bang when used. (I did have a headset which did that.) It should also cost one dollar and be bullet-proof.

Obviously I'm willing to make some compromises, since I can't even find the union of "noise cancelling earpieces" and "microphone". Any suggestions?

Being sick over the last few days has given me some time for quiet reflection, some reading, and a little bit of catching up on personal correspondence. Ying was away in NY, and the fluid in my ears has also really muted my hearing, so everything seemed really peaceful and calm in the apartment. It's intriguing the effect that something as simple as noise-level has on my mood. I think I'm going to get some noise-cancelling headphones today.

That's right: it's July 4, and to celebrate I am going to sit in perfect silence.