HoogyWeb

Holy bandwidth, Batman! Last month was a record for this humble, personal blog o’ mine. It all started around the 17th of February when some sluggish page loads prompted me to check the load on Hoogyweb’s servers. It turns out the sluggishness was my local connection, but I went on to check the stats.

My jaw dropped.

In less than two days, my blog had burned through five gigabytes of traffic on my blog, which is a lot considering the personal nature of the site.

Oh I do so love XKCD. While I don’t normally post links to comics, this one makes a great point… one I could stand to learn. So I decided to give it it’s own blog entry.

Permalink: Duty Calls (xkcd.com)

If you’re reading this on Facebook, you’ve likely noticed a flurry of new notes posted. (If not, disregard.) It’s because I just added a new feature to my personal blog, HoogyWeb.com. It’s an “RSS combiner,” and it may be the ideal solution for someone such as myself who blogs on multiple sites, but wants to combine them all on one site.

OK, people, let me start off by sharing that amongst my circle of friends I am THE biggest Mac snob. So it will come to them as a great surprise when I have something negative to say about an Apple product. But let’s look at the MacBook Air objectively, shall we?

Like that Bowie reference? Lame, I know.

Nonetheless, I felt it appropriate. Things here at Hoogyweb are a’changin, but ever so slightly. It used to be the Home page was a static welcome message that detailed some of my professional info, with a separate About Me page with more personal info. This I felt was redundant, so I combined them. They reside together in the About Me.

Additionally, the Blog page is now front and center. It is the new Home. Hoogyweb, from this point on, is a personal web log first and foremost, and not so much a professional site for storing my portfolio of work.

I’ve been working on a lot of music lately. Sometimes, ideas and concepts come from unusual places. This time, it came from software.

I was trying out Sibelius, an excellent music notation program. I usually don’t go about writing music in a transcription app, but I was dragging notes around on the staff when ideas came to me, so I went with it.

Recently I saw a positive review of Hulu.com, the joint effort of media giants News Corp. and NBC Universal, which is currently in beta testing stages. With these two mega media giants come a wealth of network content, from NBC to Fox to Sci-Fi to FX and more. I decided to check it out, and while it took me over a month to be accepted into the beta program, it was worth the wait.

Hulu is a step in the right direction. It works by allowing members to view, watch and even share episodes online. Like the current broadcasting business model, they make their money solely on advertising. Ads run periodically in the timeline of every episode and cannot be paused or fast forwarded. The ads are brief and sparse, so the convenience tradeoff is small. Hulu is far from perfect, but it shows promise for the future of broadcasting.

It was recently asked of me by a former student how I play multi-octave scales on the guitar. The answer involves a seven-note scale system I developed about 10 years ago while a in college. With it, I can fly up and down the neck relatively easily. I’m sure someone else on earth - probably many individuals - have the same scale system since it’s based on basic common sense. So, I thought I’d blog it for the rest of the world to enjoy.

New category for my blog! I added “Comics” to my blog, and to start it of, I dug up a comic from my old High School news paper.

Expect more comics soon. Check back often!