Archives March 2013

Friday night after work Ali dropped the dogs off at the house so we could go check out this years version of the Collier County Fair.  Although we aren’t living under the same roof we still share our bizarre interest in the fair.  When we left the house the sun was up, I felt plenty warm in my jeans and Big Dogs long sleeve shirt.  Grabbing a sweatshirt felt totally unnecessary.

I don’t think we ever attended the fair on a Friday night, wow was it busy.  We merged into a long line of cars waiting to get into the fairgrounds.   Once we parked and got inside the gate we immediately saw an act going on we were interested in, a dog frisbee show.  We came in on the tail end of the show but what we saw was pretty cool.  This couple rescues dogs, trains them, and then adopts them out to families to the tune to about 20 dogs a year.  That is awesome.

We walked through the tent that is “church row” .  It houses 5 or 6 church stands including the anti-abortion people.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t go to a fair looking to be “saved”.

As soon as the sun went down I knew I was going to regret not grabbing an auxiliary article of clothing for my upper body.  The temps were hurtling down quickly.  If I am cold that means Ali was frozen.

We walked through the animal area once again.  Last years fair actually was the moment in time when I decided to stop eating beef, pork, and poultry products.  This year simply reenforced that feeling.  If you take the time to observe cows and pigs, especially pigs, you can see that they are not dumb animals devoid of intelligence or feeling.

Ali and I were especially touched by these two pigs that were laying snout to snout in a reassuring manner, similar to the way Nicki and Sadie will do.

We saw two more animal acts while we were there, bears and bengal tigers.  I felt much better about the bear act.  The couple that ran it are local and described the open 2.5 acre habitat their bears roam on.   The tigers got stuffed back into these tiny compartments in a trailer.  I have a feeling they spend the majority of their time confined in a similar manner.

We walked into the heart of the carnies where the majority of the rides and games of (little) chance reside.  Ali and I were impressed in the rides this year in both quantity and quality, although we didn’t get to ride any.  Luckily since there were a lot of people at the fair, we didn’t have as many solicitations from bored carnies as in years past.

Part of the fair experience is downing fair food.  We warmed up with some pizza that was low quality, even for fair food.  We finished up with arepa’s, which is two corn patties with cheese in between.  Those were better than the pizza but by the time I finished up what was left over from Ali’s, I had enough fair food.

Last year I greatly enhanced my fair experience by hitting the beer tent pretty hard.  I tried to revisit that strategy but I only downed a single beer.  I was just too damn cold.  Unfortunately the cold weather sort of steered us towards the exit a little quicker than we may have if the thermometer was 10 degrees higher.  There was a wrestling show at 9:30 that we didn’t stick around for due to the cold. Although I was plenty cold, I saw plenty of unfortunate people walking around in shorts and t-shirts, ouch.

In years past I would usually try to find the scariest ride on the grounds and try it.  I sort of felt bad that I didn’t do any rides, it makes me feel like an old fart.  One of the unwelcome side effects of being 45 is something changes in your head that makes getting nauseous a very accessible side effect of amusement rides.   Skipping the rides actually bothered me enough that I might  go back to the fair during arm band night where you pay 10 bucks and can do unlimited rides.

I can hear the PA system of the fair very clearly from my house at night.  Hearing all the commotion makes me feel like I am missing out on something.

After the fair Ali actually headed home sans dogs, they slept over since I was going to have them for a good portion of Saturday as well.  Whenever they sleep over it is bittersweet.  I enjoy having Sadie snoring next to me but then when they go home, the next night feels very lonely.

Sadie also seems to enjoy minimizing my sleep when she is sharing the bed.  Early Saturday morning, somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-5:30 am she jammed her nose into my shoulder and then sat upright next to me, staring,  requesting attention.  Well of course my first concern is that there is some sort of urgent bathroom need so I drug myself out of bed and let her out.  She took a leak but it was far from urgent.  It’s funny how she still likes to get me up early when she is at the house, since with Ali, she won’t ever try to wake her up.  She has adopted a dual internal alarm clock depending on which bed she is in.

So Saturday morning I picked up Ali once again.  I wanted to go pick up my season tickets for the Tarpons.  While we were up there we each had a 40% off coupon for the Gap outlet that is right next door in the big Miromar Outlets.  I actually only bought one cheap shirt at Gap.  I wound up spending the majority of my money at the Adidas outlet getting another pair of training pants and shorts.  Ali scored deals from several places.

After dropping Ali back off at her place I headed home to tackle my major project of the weekend, replacing the valve cover gaskets on the Tacoma.

My prep for this job was watching a YouTube video of some guy doing the same job on a 98 Forerunner.  I left the video up on my computer as a reference although I only referred back to it a couple times.

The disassembly process wasn’t horrible although I found a couple additional steps I had to do that were not on the video, perhaps a difference between the Tacoma versus a Forerunner.  One tip that I am glad was in the video was to cover the intake opening once the plenums are removed.  The point of this is to prevent foreign objects from falling in which would be a disaster.

This tip saved my ass when I started to pull the wire loom for the fuel injectors out of the way. The loom was made out of plastic.  After 14 years the plastic had become extremely brittle.  As I lifted on it pieces flew off.  I am pretty sure if I didn’t have the intake covered plastic shrapnel would have fallen in.

When I tried to actually pull the driver side valve cover off it was sticking.  When it did finally jerk free it crashed into the loom, breaking it further, way beyond the point of no return.  I broke the remaining fragments off, knowing I would have to come up with some other way to shield the wires.  I ran into a similar problem on the other side.

When I was unbolting the valve covers it became quite obvious why they were leaking, besides old gaskets.  The bolts that hold the valve cover on were all loose, very loose.  I guess years of vibration backed them out.  It’s no wonder they were leaking oil.

My gasket set included new fittings for the spark plug tubes.  After f’ing around with replacing just one for almost 15 minutes I decided the remaining 5 old gaskets were adequate.  The new, blue Fel-pro gaskets fit the valve covers perfectly.  It was a good thing that they are seated in a ridge on the cover, keeping them snugly in place during reassembly.  Getting the covers back on is a pain in the ass.

The wires/wire loom is never removed, it is just loosened.  To remove/install the valve covers you have to work it under the wires awkwardly.  There are also a bunch of vacuum lines nearby that provide further obstacles to get around.  I did my best to maintain calm as I tried various angles of attack until I eventually found a winner.

So I got the driver side valve cover done and was almost down to putting the last bolt in the passenger side cover.  As I pushed the socket on the bolt it came loose and the bolt tumbled down below, coming to rest somewhere on the skid plates under the truck.  I crawled down there with a flash light and felt around for awhile, reaching my hand into incredibly dirty, oily, greasy places, trying to feel for the bolt.  I was unsuccessful.

At this point I was already 3 hours into the job, an hour longer than the instructional video said it should take a “novice”. The last thing I felt like doing was pulling off the skid plates.  I already knew I was going to AutoZone to get some generic wire loom so I figured I will just get another bolt while I am there, screw it.

So I had about a 90 minute round trip to and from the store where I bought some 3/4″ wire loom and two different kind of bolts, one had the right style panhead but was about 5MM shorter than the factory bolt, the second bolt had a conventional nut head but was the same length as the factory hardware.  I wanted to have my bases covered.

So by the time I got back to the house it was getting close to 5.  I had mentally resigned myself to not getting the truck back together on Saturday as I was already beat, tired and didn’t want to stay out there into the darkness.  I figured I would work until maybe 6 or so and call it a day.

Well surprisingly the reassembly process went pretty smoothly. There were a lot of vacuum hoses and electrical connectors that had to be reattached along the way.  When I was taking it apart I was concerned I might not be able to remember where it all went but most of it fell right into place.

I did use some visual aids when it came to reinstalling the spark plug wires.  I drew myself a small diagram illustrating how the two sides connected together as well as laying the wires out on my folding table in the same layout as they were removed.

I had everything back together in around an hour.  I was very nervous when I turned the key, hoping I didn’t forget to attach something along the way.  A smile crept across my tired face as the truck started up and sounded normal, whew.

It was a challenging job, made more challenging by the brittle plastic.  Luckily the generic wire loom I used seems like it will be adequate to protect the injector wires going forward.  In total I was out there for close to 5 hours.  I was stiff and sore.  However those pains were dulled by the knowledge that I succeeded in a repair task that I probably would have stayed away from a few years ago.  Unfortunately I wont really know how effective my new gaskets are until some time passes.

So I Saturday night it felt like my brain was punching a ticket that my body was not willing to cash in.  I got it in my head I wanted to do a personal triathlon Sunday morning incorporating running, riding and swimming.  Saturday I was walking around stiff legged and slow, hardly the way I want to feel before asking my body to endure a triple brick a few hours later.

Well Sunday morning I drug myself out of bed.  I wasn’t feeling great but better than 7 hours prior.  I still had the mental need to complete this fitness goal so I gathered my stuff to do so.  I decided since it was St Patricks Day it would be appropriate to wear the bike jersey I bought in Ireland.  It is too small for me, it’s only a medium but I figured for one day I could jam myself into it.

I pulled into the water park a little after 8:30.  First up was a two lap run around the outside of the park grounds which adds up to 4 miles.  It was my first running since the half marathon.  Early on I did not feel great, my legs were feeling the side effects of the Tacoma work.  It felt like the first mile or so I had a slight limp in my stride.

As I was on the back stretch of the last lap I pulled down on the bike jersey that I had on under a t-shirt, it was sliding up my belly.  A few seconds later I heard what sounded like a piece of wood hit the path behind me.  I wondered if a small branch dropped but did not bother to turn around to look.

So I got back to the truck after my 4 miles and reached around to the back of my bike jersey, I had put the key to the truck in one of the bottle pockets that are on the back, figuring that would be the safest, least obtrusive spot.  Hmm weird, I didn’t feel the key.  Again I patted down my back and felt nothing but skin, what the fck??!!!

I then awkwardly get my hand inside one of the pockets and feel my finger poke out a large hole!  Obviously this must be the pocket where the key formally resided.  Great.

Well my mind immediately recalled the noise on the pathway.  I hoped that noise was actually the key falling out.  I hopped on the bike and sped over in that direction, hoping nobody picked the key up.  I breathed a sigh of relief when I spotted the key.  I was very lucky.  If it dropped out in the grassy portion of the run I would have never heard/found it.

So the bike leg of my tri got a late start.  I had a good ride, slightly slower than the previous week but with a 4 mile run to pre-fatigue my body it is to be expected.  With the wind to my back I was over 20 mph, with it in my face I was in the 17’s.

The swim portion of the tri went fine, I did 1000 yards of swimming broken into 400,400, 200 segments.  My right shoulder hurts quite a bit during the early portion of the swim but feels pretty good by the end of it.  I decided to opt out of a post workout pool pizza lunch, instead heading directly home.

During Sunday afternoon I attended to various left over duties around the house.  I also had a brief visit from Randall’s girlfriend and her friend Ceci.  They had run a half marathon up in Sarasota that morning and stopped by to pick up stuff I was giving to Randall (old 360, Bose system).   They couldn’t stay long since they still had a long drive across the alley and St Patrick Day drinking plans.

Speaking of which, I maintained my odd tradition of a dry St Patricks Day.  I didn’t go out. I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol.  It really isn’t a conscious effort.  Nobody invited me out to celebrate and it wasn’t important enough for me to actively seek out St Patty’s madness.

Instead I spent my Sunday night watching Abraham Lincoln : Vampire Hunter.  I remember when I saw the preview for this in theaters last year I thought it was an incredibly silly premise.  I later heard the film had a huge budget but as expected, did not do well at the box office.

Well I wanted to see just how they managed to portray one of the most famous presidents in history as a vampire hunter so I threw it in my Netflix queue.  Well it turns out they did a pretty decent job of making it work.

Of course nothing can make you forget the strangeness of the plot but if you allow yourself to just go with the flow of the movie and not do much reality checking you will find a mostly enjoyable experience.  I thought the movie was fun and surely worth a Netflix rental.  I never thought I would see Lincoln kicking ass and taking names with a silver tipped axe but now that I have, I like it. B+

Regular blog readers I apologize, this post is targeted at getting picked up by others looking for info regarding how to tame WordPress CPU use in a shared hosting environment.

A month ago I arranged to migrate/host a website for a worldwide calisthenics/bar exercise group that I participate in.  The site needed a refresh and I thought WordPress would be a good back end to host the site since it is so flexible yet powerful.  After about a month of getting the new site ready we opened the doors in early February.

Well within several hours of launch the site was shut down by my shared web hosting provider due to very high CPU utilization.  They said I was averaging 170 cpu minute cycles, the limit for shared hosting for them is 60.  They identified a couple plug ins that were causing a lot of cpu usage, WP-SPAMFREE and Nextgen Photo Gallery.    I told them I would remove the plug ins.

Well this began more than a month long back and forth battle between my web host and I.  They would shut down the domain, I would get it turned back on,  do more tweaks and then it would get shut down again.  Finally, I have done enough tweaking to get the site safely below the CPU threshold.

When I first launched the site in addition to the high CPU use I had a lot of bandwidth and hits as well.  Over 6 gig of traffic was recorded the first day.  The amount of unique visitors wasn’t crazy, around 1500 but the amount of overall hits reported for those visitors seemed disproportionately high, over 200,000.

My first work was done streamlining the plug ins as I mentioned, eliminating the use of any that were CPU hogs which helped a bit but not nearly enough.

Next I scoured the internet for suggestions on making WP play nice with shared hosting.  One of most frequent suggestions was to install a caching plug in.  A cache plug in saves resources by presenting most visitors with a cached, flat file instead of a dynamic page that has to be created with database calls each and every time.

I first tried WP Super Cache but later switched to W3 Total Cache as it is well established as the most powerful caching engine out there.  Enabling the caching plug in made a major dent in the amount of bandwidth and cpu that I was utilizing but not nearly enough, I was still 15-20 cpu minutes over the threshold.

One of the reasons W3 is awesome is it has direct support for other traffic optimizing services, like CDN’s. (content delivery networks)  A CDN is a service whose sole purpose is to house the larger files that make up your website and serve them up very quickly, offloading the traffic from your shared host to them seamlessly.  I utilized Amazon Cloudfront as my CDN.  There is a small cost associated with the service but nothing painful.

Setting up the CDN made a huge difference in the bandwidth used by the site which was averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 gigs a day.  After implementing the CDN the traffic dropped to 200 MEGS, wow!  I thought I finally had the problem licked but alas, once again my host shut down the site, saying my utilization was much better but still above the red line.

I implemented some more changes as I was still seeing an unusually high amount of hits for the amount of unique visitors the site was getting.  I set up a robots.txt file to try to stop the site from being crawled incessantly by web search spiders.  I turned on the WP setting that discourages search engines as well as following a few other tweaks I obtained from others posting on the problem.   Again, they helped, but not enough.

After a month of this crap I was about ready to give up, resigning myself to having to move the site to more expensive hosting like wpengine.com. (great place to host WP)  However before raising the white flag I decided to implement one more idea I read about, CloudFlare.

CloudFlare is a service designed to analyze and scrub your website traffic before it even hits your web host.  W3 again directly supports the service.  The way it works is you actually need to change your DNS for the domain to point to the CloudFlare service.  Yes, it sounded problematic to me as well, but it has been seamless thus far.

So when traffic for your site comes in CloudFlare sees it, determines if it is legitimate or bots, crawlers or other undesirables.  If it is legit it passes the traffic along, if it isn’t it kills it on the spot.

Well this has been the magic bullet.  Since implementing CloudFlare my cpu usage has plummeted.  Cloudflare has been eliminating over 60% of the traffic coming in, it was all non-human requests that were hammering the site.  My most recent stats showed that 600 visitors generated, 3500 hits which makes much more sense.  It is amazing just how much of an impact bots were having on the site.

The best part of all is the cost, zero.  I am able to use the free level of service.  CloudFlare has higher levels of service that would be useful for bigger operations but for me, free works just fine.

Here are some useful plug ins that helped me streamline the site:

P3 (Plug in Performance Analyzer) – this loads various pages in your site and creates a clear report of which plug ins on your site are killing performance.  It also lets you know how many SQL calls are required to load an average page.  Obviously the less calls made, the better.

Plugin Organizer – this allows you to selectively disable plug ins for only certain areas on your site.  In my case it allowed me to turn off certain stuff when running the SimplePress forum on my site. But turns them on otherwise.

WP-Optimize – Let’s you see details of your WP database and clean out unnecessary tables left by old plug ins, post revisions and more.  This allowed me to greatly reduce the size of my WP db.

So to recap in a Cliff Notes way, if you are having CPU warnings from your host I would advise you to do the following:

Install W3 total cache.  There are various resources on the web that can guide you on the recommended settings.

Utilize a CDN.  It will speed up your site and reduce usage on your shared hosting

Set up a robots.txt file and discourage search engines in WP

Set up CloudFlare!  This service is simply awesome.  It is like putting a condom on your website.

These changes knocked my CPU usage down 70% from where I started and saved me from having to spend a bunch more of money on my hosting.

Of course my web host said the only way I could fix the problem was by migrating to their dramatically more expensive dedicated hosting.  I guess they were wrong.

So last night on the way home from work I stopped at the Auto Zone near my work to pick up a set of valve cover gaskets for the Tacoma.  Well evidently they recently sold their last set but a quick check of inventory showed the store located on Pine Ridge had them.  I redirected my normal home route and picked them up.

I inadvertently secured myself a 10% discount from this chain of events and realized it is something anyone can do with a little planning.  AutoZone has a policy that if one store doesn’t have an item and you have to drive to another AutoZone location to get it they knock 10% off the price.  This is the second time they have done this for me.

The way you could manufacture this discount is to check their website ahead of time which has pretty accurate real time store inventory.  If you see two nearby stores and one has the part and the other doesn’t,  you simply stop at the store that you know doesn’t have the part first.  They will give you a little print out that you take to the second store, instant 10% discount.  Now of course this would only make sense if the item you are buying costs more than a few bucks and if the stores are close enough together.  In my case both of these criteria were met.

So yesterday I got another email from IX.  It was from somebody in the Ukranian part of their help desk had responded regarding my CPU utilization issue.  The email made no sense.  The person said my account was still using too much CPU time but the stats she included for each day had no numbers and the scripts listed had small CPU usage numbers.  I was pissed and immediately called them up.

I told the guy this email made no sense, stating I was still using too much CPU time but the stats in the message did not back that up.  He did some quick checking of my CPU usage and he saw that for the past two days my CPU use has been well below the threshold. (thanks to the wonders of CloudFlare)  He said he was not sure what his Ukranian counterpart was looking at.  He marked the ticket as finally being closed, after more than a month of my scrambling to get out from under the problem.

When I got home last night I decided I wanted to try to beat my pull up reps max.  I did a strong set of 23 at the gym over lunch and I thought I might have a shot at at least matching my improbable 30 reps I nailed down last October.  I wound up a little short, bailing after rep 28, my grip was burning.  It would have been cool to hit the magic 30 rep number again.  It’s coming.

Last night Tuki made me snap for a brief period of time.  Tuki does a lot of things that are annoying, like screeching when I go into certain areas of the house, trying to attack me when I do stuff like change his crocks and clean his cage.  He also likes to fly off the top of the cage when I have him out as I walk by, giving my head a fly by.  99% of the time I just ignore his antics since it is well established the bird doesn’t like me.

Well last night I was carrying laundry back to the bedroom and Tuki was on top of his cage.  As I walked by he launches himself and bangs into the side of my head during one of his flight loops.  Well that flipped my switch instantly.  I get within 6 inches of the bird and scream “Do NOT fly into my head!”  I follow it up by smashing my fist on the top of his cage several times for emphasis.  I think I got my point across.

This weekend I would like to tackle the valve cover gasket replacement on the truck.  I am a bit hesitant to embark on this repair as it requires a LOT of disassembly, more than any Tacoma work I have done thus far.  I need to allow myself an entire afternoon to do the work to accommodate the hurdles I always manage to hit.

I’m hoping to rack up another training brick Sunday morning as well.  For entertainment I always have 4 more Walking Dead the game episodes to play through and Abraham Lincoln:Vampire Hunter sitting in a Netflix envelope on my counter.

I am annoyed that the opening game for the Florida Tarpons, the arena football team that I bought two season tickets for this season, has their opening game on Monday night.  Monday, wtf?  Last night all the home games were on a Saturday night but one.  I need to find someone to go with me.

I had to just stand in the background and quietly laugh to myself over all of the new pope hoopla yesterday.  It almost seemed like Super Bowl style coverage. The tight chimney video feed so people could see if the smoke was black or white, the evening news broadcasts live on site at the Vatican,  the endless shots of massive crowds going wild, it was crazy.

Once it was announced I heard a lot of people in my immediate environment buzzing as well, talking of how exciting it was to have a new pope.  One woman was excited that he was “only” 76.  Others were impressed that he was a jesuit, the first ever to be pope.  Others thought it was cool that he wore a plain wooden cross instead of an ornate gold cross that most popes chose to wield.

Personally I am a bit disappointed that they didn’t go with the black candidate from Africa.  Now that would have been something that would have impressed me.  Of course I am sure they realized all the old, white, religious closet  racists would not be very excited to hang a picture of a brother on their wall.

Of course all of this excitement is lost on me.  From my non-religious viewpoint, I am pleased that “Francis” does at least not look like pure devil spawn as Benedict did.  However when I read a headline like this, where he states gay marriage is the work of the devil, he loses me instantly.

In the end, Francis is just the latest figurehead for an organization that has been responsible for some of the largest atrocities in history in the name of “God” and more recently, the worlds biggest cover/enabler for a network of serial child molesters.  Another 10 mil was just paid out to cover the tracks of another pedophile priest in LA the other day.

So I finished up episode 1 of the Walking Dead game.  I got frustrated for awhile when I was spinning my wheels trying to figure out how to get through certain points in the game.  I mean how was I supposed to know that to break the padlock on the security gate I needed to first drive to the motel, kill a bunch of zombies and then grab a fireman’s axe?

I am sure there is a step by step walk through out there of how to get through the game quickly but at this point I want to continue trying to progress “naked”.   My difficulties wound up in my staying up later than normal.  My eyelids paid the price this morning.

Last night I received my latest Netflix dvd, the original Catfish movie/documentary that launched the present day MTV series. I wasted no time watching it, throwing it in my 360 to watch while I ate dinner.

Wow this was the grand daddy of deceit.  Nev’s story is pretty incredible, yet as I am finding out, deception in relationships that begin on a monitor is not unusual at all.  The level of deception in this case steps it up a few notches however. I found the film entertaining and well done.  Nev is a very likable guy.  Watching him stumble upon the deception is a pretty interesting process to witness. I’d give it an A-.

At the very end of the film is the explanation where the term “Catfish” came from when used in an online dating scenario.  It is quite interesting, in both the actual definition and the person that delivers it.

So my first day of utilizing CloudFlare on the Bar-barians web site has shown some promising results.  It filtered out a massive 62% of the traffic hitting the site that was bot related.  It also identified some malicious traffic originating from China, Japan and the UK that was hitting the site which it also filtered out.  I haven’t heard updated CPU utilization numbers from IX but they have to be way down since that 62% of traffic never even touched their servers.

Although all these issues with keeping the BB site up and running has been frustrating, I sure have learned a lot how to reduce the impact of a WordPress site in a shared server environment.

Last night I headed out back to my bar park to do something I haven’t done in a long time, muscle ups.  My long road to accomplish a muscle up is well documented through out this blog.  In total I worked on getting my first one for at least two years, getting on top of the bar for the first time in September of 2011.

Once I got my first muscle up I worked the movement a lot, building up to a max of 7 reps after a few months.  I was really into it.  However then a weird thing happened, I stopped doing them.  Well not totally, but muscle ups took a back burner in my bar work.  Part of this was because of some injuries, aches and pains in my wrist and elbows that made a muscle up very painful to do.  Part of it was because I directed my calisthenic gaze in another direction.

So anyway for whatever reason I decided last night I wanted to do some muscle ups.  It had been quite a while since I did a bar muscle up so I wasn’t even sure of my ability to still get over the bar.  Luckily my muscle memory had not gone senile and I was able to knock out a few small sets.  In total I did 10 reps.

I had forgotten the auxiliary benefits of doing muscle ups, at least for me.  It makes you feel powerful.  There is something about pulling yourself up and over the bar that is hard to explain until you accomplish it yourself.

I felt really good after swinging down from my last rep,  good enough that muscle ups will be back on my regular calisthenics menu indefinitely.

So I decided to try one more trick to get the Bar-barians web site to play nice with my shared hosting, setting up a CloudFlare account. CloudFare is web site accelerator but the way it does it is interesting.  It uses some of the same caching tricks as other WordPress accelerators however the big difference is how it cleans the traffic coming to your site.

To implement Cloudflare you actually have to change your domain name servers to point to Cloudflare DNS servers.  As a result all traffic is inspected by their service which has the ability to filter out the bullshit traffic that can hammer a WordPress based website.  Spam bots, web crawlers and most other non-human being traffic is picked off and never even touches your actual web site.  This has the potential to dramatically reduce the load on your site.

W3 Total Cache has built in support for CloudFlare so it was very easy to implement.  Really the only thing that made me nervous was pointing the DNS for the domain somewhere else but it seems to work just fine and is simple to reverse if need be.  I am using their free tier of service.

Of course I have no way to know how much impact this change has until I get a new report from IX since I can’t get it myself.  If this last ditch effort fails I plan to move the site to wpengine.com, one of the best places to host a WordPress site.  Yea it costs some money, but it appears to be money well spent based on the reviews I see about them.

I had a couple hours at home last night that felt pretty hectic.  I was compiling video, trying to fix a problem with my home server, doing laundry, making dinner and trying to set up a new Xbox 360 I got from Tim.  I was rotating between the various tasks trying to multitask the best I could.  Finally I got things under control.

As I was setting the new 360 up I wound up stumbling across the Walking Dead game on Xbox Live.  I fired it up, curious if it was any good.  Wow, it isn’t good, it’s f’ing great.

The game literally makes you feel like you are in the middle of a Walking Dead episode.  It is a pretty perfect combo of cinematic, action and exploring.  When you dialogue with various characters you have a choice of various responses.  The choices you make change the way the game plays out.

There are intense, scary moments where you need to perform certain actions in order to save your own ass.  I could feel my heart rate rocketing as I had to kick a zombie off me repeatedly before I grabbed a hammer to smash its head in.

As I was playing it I was wondering how in the world could I be playing this awesome game for free?  Well as I looked at the options screen I saw how.  They break the game into chapters, they give you chapter one for free, to hook you in.  If you want to continue subsequent chapters they will start sucking Xbox credits out of your account.  They might grab a few of my credits, it really is an immersive game, especially when played with the lights low, surround sound on and a 73 inch TV to put the action in your face.

I have been a Costco member for a few months, long enough to give an accurate opinion of what I do and don’t like about Costco in comparison to Sam’s Club.

From a  moral/ethical standpoint Costco wins hands down.  They treat their employees much better than Sam’s does.  Costco also seems more concerned with supporting made in America products more so than Sam’s does.

Costco seems to have more ancillary services tied to their membership than Sam’s does.  They also have a more diverse online web store.

However here is what I DON’T like about my local Costco.

It is swamped, all the time, especially during snowbird season.  I used to think Sam’s got busy at times.  It’s nothing compared to Costco.  The Sam’s Club  floor plan is more wide open than Costco as well.  I never get away from the feeling of being crowded in Costco, ever. When I stopped at Sam’s on Friday it wasn’t bad at all, I didn’t feel like I was drowning in humanity once.

Costco has no labels on it’s aisles (Sam’s does) other than some number that means nothing to me.  How hard is it to post signage identifying the type of products that are in a particular aisle?  It makes it annoying to figure out where stuff is, especially if you are new to the store.  I don’t want to have to snake up and down every aisle in the store to figure out where the item I need is located.

There are a couple things that I can’t get at Costco like Zone Bars, which I can understand  I guess.  What I can’t understand is why they don’t sell something like bulk bags of outdoor bird seed.

The parking lot at my Costco is poorly designed and a royal pain in the ass to get into and out of.  The Sam’s parking lot isn’t great but it is way better than the Costco maze.

Finally, Costco doesn’t have self check out lines, something Sam’s implemented in the last year.  I always prefer to check myself out when possible.  The line is almost always non-existent since so many people are lazy fat asses that view self checkout as being too much like work.

So I currently have both club memberships since my Sam’s card auto renewed last October.  I intended to totally remove Sam’s Club from my life but the Costco negatives I listed here has that plan up in the air.

So my weekend had no outside obligations so I decided to fill it up with internal things.  I woke up Saturday morning with a spring in my step.  The bright sun and cool, crisp temperatures seemed like an ideal scenario to get stuff done.  I was outside and weeding by 7:30.

I decided I wanted to get the rest of the landscape beds mulched on Saturday.  After weeding was done I pulled out in the truck.  I made a pit stop on my way to Home Depot at mom’s place.  She was at work but had asked me if I could take a look at her noisy toilet.  I also dropped off a bunch of stuff I harvested from the garden for her.

From my years of yard maintenance I know that the back of the Tacoma will hold about 30 bags of mulch. I also knew I would need more than 30 bags to finish the job which included the orchard, the border around the pool and the two raised areas around the palms in the front yard.

I also made a pit stop at the pool store.  When I went to flip on the pump Saturday morning to run the pool vacuum I got nothing, the pump acted like it was dead.  I smelled an electrical burn that concerned me.  The last thing I needed was to have to replace the pool pump after all of the money I have spent on other home repairs/improvements the last few weeks.

Well after verifying that there was power going to the pump I jumped on the internet to get some guidance.  Maybe it is something I can fix easily myself.  Thankfully it was.  There is a large capacitor that can go bad on a pool pump.  The only thing I had to verify was that the motor was not seized up.  Luckily on this Pentair pool pump that was easy to do.  There is a plastic cap that covers the shaft of the motor. After removing the cap, a quick grab and twist verified the motor itself was spinning freely.

The local Pinch a Penny had replacement capacitors as this is a pretty common failure.  I was a bit surprised that it cost $43 but I was still way ahead of the $500 I would have potentially spent if I didn’t do any homework and just replaced the pump.  The replacement of the cap was easy.  I was quite relieved when I threw the switch and the pump came roaring back to life.   I taped the process just in case there are others on the internet looking into replacing their own pool pump caps.

So as I was spreading my first 30 bags of mulch I found myself kind of enjoying it.  The labor was steady but not brutal, the sky was bright blue, humidity low and the temperatures perfect for working outside.  I could hardly believe the orchard consumed almost the entire 30 bags of red mulch.  I knew I would be heading back out for another load.

I decided to grab another 30 bags although the rough estimation in my head told me I probably could get away with only 25.  I figure it is better to figure a little high than go low and wind up having to go back out once again.

By the time I was almost done spreading the mulch the lustre had worn off the joys of yard work.  Ironically, the sky by that time had become overcast and looked like rain could be looming around the corner.  Just as I was in the homestretch of ripping open the 30 additional mulch mulch bags I was startled by the sound of a voice behind me saying “Excuse me, sir”..

I jumped a little bit as I spun around.  It was a young guy, a younger looking guy and a young girl.  They were people that lived up the street that said they were interested in the garage fridge I was giving away for free.  I had posted it on the community Yahoo groups email list I started several years ago.

In the ad I said that if needed, I could help deliver the fridge in my truck although I was hoping to not have to follow up on that offer.  When I saw their mid-size sedan in the driveway I knew I would be put to work.  I backed the truck up to the garage and with the help of the two young guys hoisted the original fridge that came with the house into the bed of the Tacoma.

I haphazardly used one of my ratcheting straps to keep the fridge from rolling anywhere.  Luckily I only had to go a few streets up the road.

The house the young couple lived at was at the very end of the street.  The house was WAY off the street and required traversing a twisty, bumpy sand driveway to get there.

The house was interesting.  You could tell that when it was built there was some real thought and effort put into it.  However it looks like at one point it probably became when of the many foreclosure casualties in my area.  The young couple obviously didn’t have the means to keep the place well maintained.

We guided the fridge inside using my hand truck.  It felt kind of weird leaving it at a strangers place after being under my roof for over a dozen years.  Oh well, it freed up room in the garage and hopefully will serve it’s new family well.  The young couple thanked me for my efforts.  I headed home and resumed my labor.

In addition to the mulching, I grabbed some additional stuff at Home Depot as improvements to the yard and garden.  For the garden I grabbed a tray of a different kale variety and cauliflower.  Both will be great home grown food additions if they flourish.

For the yard I bought an avocado tree and a coconut palm.  The avocado tree was planted up front in the spot the remains of the frost murdered plumeria resided.  In the past year I discovered that I like avocado.  It just happens to be a GREAT super food.  It would be awesome to be able to eventually grow my own.

The coconut palm was planted where the palmetto used to be.  The coconut palm that is planted off the corner of the pool cage is probably my favorite tree on my land.  That actually started as a tree of roughly the same size as what I bought.  It’s now probably 30 feet high and has fronds that are 12 feet long.

I just happened to have enough castle wall stone left to make a small border around the palm tree. I weed blocked and mulched the area for aesthetics.  I am crossing my fingers it takes hold and flourishes.

By the time the last tool was put away I was thoroughly spent.  I had managed to fill pretty much the entire day with various work although I did like the fruits of my labor.  The landscaped areas look much better with their new thick coat of mulch.  You can see all the pictures from the day here.

Saturday night I made the mistake of downing a couple Bud Light Platinums on an empty stomach compounded with a dehydrated body, I hardly drank any water all day long.  The end result was my getting buzzed extremely quick.  While buzzed I went on a Facebook posting spree, throwing up a bunch of random, mostly stupid things.  Moral of the story, don’t drink and post to Facebook.

On Sunday morning I got off to a late start thanks to the clocks jumping forward this weekend.  My planned brick at the waterpark didn’t get started until shortly before 11.  I had a surprisingly decent bike ride, averaging  18.5 mph on the 12.5 mile ride.

Ali showed up to join me for the swim portion of the brick.  I put in 800 meters at the pool, the last 400 were at a fast (for me)  8 minutes.  It was really surprising because my swimming endurance felt pretty damn awful.  I felt gassed after the first 200.

The was my first brick of 2013.  Hell it was my first swimming since last September and I don’t think I have done any fast biking in almost as long.  It felt good to get out there. I hope to reestablish Sunday bricks as part of my normal fitness routine.   I just need get them done earlier in the day.

On my way home I stopped at Ali’s place (she was not home) to get a book case she no longer needed since the Ikea additions to her place.  Once verifying it was the correct width to fit in the vacated fridge wall space, I loaded it into the truck.  Doing this myself was tricky.  I carefully slid the shelf down the carpeted stairs which include a 180 degree turn and then awkwardly hoisted it on to the tailgate.

It fit the wall perfectly although a finished wood shelf may not look very stylish in a garage setting.  It gave me a lot of functional storage space over the fridge, which had become a one shelf storage area in the past year.

The SSR got a needed bath Sunday afternoon.  It has had a bug facial since the SSR meet up.  I never get tired of washing the truck.  I love the way it looks when I am done.

Sunday night Ali and I went to go see the Great and Powerful Oz.  Since neither of us had plans we figured we might as well go together.  Ali is a huge Wizard of Oz fan so the idea of a prequel to one of her favorite films of all time was appealing to her.  I went to get out of the house, I don’t share Alison’s love of OZ.

The movie wasn’t bad although I was fighting a severe case of drowsiness throughout.  Ali thought it was really good which isn’t surprising since she loves the story so much.  Personally I’d give it a B or B+ but if you love OZ you will be into this film for sure.

So once again I had IX Webhosting turn off the Bar-barians web site.  I am finding myself thoroughly annoyed at the way they have been handling the issue of CPU utilization.  When the new BB site first launched in early February I had no idea it would get as much traffic as it has.  In 30 days it got somewhere around 2 million hits.  Hits are page views, not 2 million unique visitors.  That is a lot.

I have been really working hard at getting the site as optimized as possible by doing things like utilizing W3 Total Cache, implementing a CDN via Amazon Cloudfront and making dozens of little tweaks to minimize the load on the shared server.  My efforts have gotten CPU usage down significantly but IX still says it is too high.  Ok fine, I understand the need to keep utilization down.  What I don’t understand is how poorly IX is at handling the situation professionally.

Each time they turn off the domain I have to call them, let them know I was going to do additional tweaking and then they would turn the domain back on.  In the support ticket it always says they will check usage again in 48-72 hours to see if my changes helped.  Well what has happened each time is this recheck date passes, the domain is still online, so I assume what I did worked.

Well instead what happens is a random amount of days after the stated recheck someone actually does it.  When they do, instead of notifying me of the new usage numbers, they just shut the domain off again without notifying me first, requiring me to start the process all over again.

There are several problems I have with the support I have gotten on IX on the problem.  First, nobody “owns” my ticket.  Each and every time this happens I have dealt with a different person, none of which has a grasp on what has been going on.  It’s very annoying that they don’t assign tickets to individuals so they work with customers to resolve them completely.

Second their repeated pattern of letting their own recheck dates pass seems crazy and piles on to the frustration.  In this latest incident, I was told the domain was going to be rechecked on March 6th.  It actually wasn’t checked until FOUR DAYS LATER.  Since I had not been contacted on the 6th I assumed I was in the clear.  BAM, nope, you are dead, again.

Third, IX does not give their customers a way to check their cpu utilization themselves.  It requires one of their network administrators to pull a report.  This means there is no real time way for me to know how much of an impact the changes I am making are helping.  I make a tweak and then basically know it didn’t work when they turn off the domain again.  It is VERY inefficient.

So I am done trying to shoehorn the Bar-barians web site into my current hosting account.  I have several options.  The cpu usage on my account looks like if I split the BB web site onto it’s own shared hosting account it would fall under the CPU threshold at IX.  However after all the aggravation with the way IX has handled the issue I don’t really feel like rewarding them with more of my business.

I could move the site to shared hosting with a different provider, one that has a reputation of being more friendly to WordPress hosting and has better tolerance of the demands WordPress hosting can put on a server.

Finally I could look again at moving the site back to the Amazon cloud.  However I am not sure what size instance I would need to run the site efficiently.  Depending on the size I would settle on (a micro instance was woefully underpowered) I could wind up with a sizable hosting charge.   I am also not sure how keen I am taking on the responsibility of administering the virtual Linux server from floor to ceiling since I only have very limited knowledge of the environment.

So anyway, this week I will be looking in earnest at new home for the Bar-barians site, I need this Groundhog Day scenario to come to an end.

So last night I threw my latest Netflix DVD into the Xbox, Snow White and the Huntsman.  I don’t really recall why I added it to my queue in the first place.  Maybe it was because Charlize Theron is hot? Anyway, the movie was fine, I found it mildly entertaining.  Besides Charlize, it also has Kristen Stewart and the dude from Thor in the cast.  It is a decent Netflix rental and not much more, I’d give it a B.

On thing I would give a solid A+ to is my new sound system.  Not only does it sound awesome, I just love the network connectivity.  It allows me to wirelessly stream any audio from my Iphone 5 to the system from anywhere in the house.  This morning I was blaring the Stern show via the Sirius Iphone app on the system.  It works for Ipod music and Pandora as well.

Last night I got a jump start on my weekend work by doing laundry, cleaning Tuki’s cage and the bathrooms.  This weekend I am planning to load up the back of the Tacoma with 30 bags of mulch to cover the landscaped areas that did not get touched as part of the pond border project.  Unfortunately, 30 bags might not be enough to cover what is left.

The water park is now open again on weekends.  I am thinking of firing up my training bricks by doing a decent bike ride followed up by swimming.  My shoulders (especially my right one) hurt like hell once more and swimming seems to be a very good way to keep that under control.

I might buy my Tacoma valve cover gasket kit this weekend.  Once I have it hanging on the pegboard it will give me visual motivation to get the job done.