I didn't notice any hill...

Surprisingly, the flower_cat remembered to wish me a happy birthday even before I got out of bed this morning. And the Younger Daughter, super_star_girl, did so on our way out the door to take her to school. So I don't suppose anybody is going to let me forget that I turned 60 today.

I don't feel any older...

Announcements: albums and concerts and parties, oh my!

My upcoming CD, Coffee, Computers, and Song!, is still available for preorder by snail-mail or PayPal. We are now looking at having it ready sometime in April. I made pretty good progress over the weekend, with more than a third of the tracks finished and only a handful needing additional fixup recording. Now that I'm over my seasonal cold, I should be able to take care of that over the weekend.

I now have both my concert at Consonance, and most of the preceeding concert by cflute and tibicina, up on the web. I missed a few songs in Callie and Rebecca's due to fumbling with the Mac's choice of defalt input devices; if anyone else has a copy I'd be grateful, especially if it includes "Lullaby" and "Nuts from the Hazel Tree".

Grand Central Starport is holding its annual "It's Green!" potluck party this coming Saturday, March 17th. This year, in addition to St. Patrick's Day and a slew of birthdays, we're celebrating the chaoswolf's engagement to selkit. No need to RSVP; just show up.

Second Life runs Debian

Inside Second Life's Data Centers - Technology News by InformationWeek

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and Advanced Micro Devices servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, say Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller says.

Homing from work

Went in to work today mainly for two reasons: to make sure my tech reports got printed on time (mr_kurt took care of that, along with the rest of the group's -- thank you), and to attend a talk that turned out to be almost content-free. So after a delightful birthday lunch with the flower_cat at Cafe Bombay (an old favorite that we hadn't been back to since it moved about a year ago), a short walk, and about an hour's worth of email I decided to take the rest of the day off.

I'd been planning to take some time off this week anyway. So instead of working from home I found myself homing from work, taking advantage of a T1 line and a fast computer to have a careful look at Oasis' graphics templates. The Gimp is happy to import both PDF and Photoshop files, so it was easy to get the information I needed off the templates, but there aren't any open-source equivalents for the layout software they want me to use. I'll probably end up borrowing a machine at work, if I can find anyone there with Pagemaker or Illustrator.

Finished off the work day with a bit of Linux evangelism (posted both here in LJ and in my work blog) and looking over finagler's slides for Thursday's patent review committee meeting -- I'm a co-inventer.

Tracks

And to finish off a reasonably productive day, (after taking the trash out to the curb and processing a sink-full of dishes) I added some reverb to the vocals on "Mushrooms". Could still use a little tweaking on the mix, but it's pretty good.