March 2006 Archives

You may have been wondering why our site has been intermittently unavailable for the last few days. If you're a diligent user, you would have noticed on the main page how it says to check out http://status.cementhorizon.com/ to find out what's going on.

Turns out our DNS providers problems are real, I'm not losing my mind. Here's what they wrote me back (after emailing the 3 times in 4 days).

Dear Sir/Madam, 
 
thank you for your email. 
 
Unfortunately there is a DDOS Attack on Joker.com Nameservers. 
 
Joker.com currently experiences extremely massive distributed denial
 of service attacks against nameservers. 
 
This affects the DNS resolution of Joker.com itself, and also domains 
which use the Joker.com nameservers. 
 
We condemn this attack on the sharpest, at the same time our network
 department works very hard and does everything in order to achieve a 
permanent solution. 
 
We are very sorry about this incident and for any inconvenience this 
may have caused. 
 
Thank you for your understanding and with best regards, 
 
your Joker.com team 

I just got back from seeing José González down the street at the Swedish American Hall. If you've tuned into my morning radio show in the last 2 or 3 months, you'll have heard this guy since I play music from his debut album alot. The show was fantastic if brief.

Some things I hadn't realized about him; He's a very technically adept guitarist. I hadn't realized the complexity of a lot of stuff he's doing on his album. My favorite song, "Hints", is mind boggling to see him play. The majority of the song is played not by strumming but by moving his fingers along the frets rapidly. He's also extremely shy. He didn't speak between songs at all for the first half. He's Swedish by birth and Argentinian by heritage. He sings in a flawless American english accent and then between songs when he speaks, he does so with a heavy Spanish accent. It's downright unnerving.

He finished out his set with a riveting cover of "Teardrop" by Massive Attack. He said thank you and the entire room erupted in a standing ovation in seconds. It was a moving experience. He played 3 more songs and was gone. 55 minute set. Best thing I've seen in the last 2 months. You can get his album here.

I've often wondered why our edward 40 hands photo album gets so much traffic. I setup Google's new "SiteMap" feature today and found that our photo galleries rank very highly for the search edward 40 hands. I went to google and searched for edward 40 hands on the main search page (not the image search page). Here's the URL : http://www.google.com/search?q=edward%2040%20hands. Click it and see what google serves up. They're actually (for what reason I don't know) injecting thumbnails of our photo gallery photos into the web results, like a query for ferrari 360. This finally explains why that album gets so much traffic, people just can't resist seeing the bigger image of Mike with 40's taped to his hands.