I just sent him the kids’ college fund.  Obama was great too, though.

Still funny though.  Via The Awl.

I’m working on a little Sinatra project that uses ActiveRecord to access a MySQL database.  Funny thing, every fifth request or so would take a long time.  I’d just as well sit there and wait; but you wouldn’t, so I figured it out.

Son of a bitch, ActiveRecord’s connection pool.  In a Rails app, ActionPack’s request handling life cycle calls ActiveRecord::Base.clear_active_connections! to return connections to the pool. Not so in Sinatra.

Sinatra has before filters but not after filters, so it’ll have to be a Rack solution.  So simple, it isn’t even worth a gem.  I stuck this at the top of my Sinatra app:

class Crack
    def initialize(app)
      @app = app
    end

    def call(env)
      response = @app.call(env)
      ActiveRecord::Base.clear_active_connections!
      response
    end
  end

  use Crack

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Clear reception in Northern Virginia. Finally.

Don’t know this band from Adam, but I love this venue.  I wish all bands posted video of their basement jams.

Feel like I’m getting somewhere with Ableton.

Sweet, I’ll just get a different phone for now.

Carter, Adam and I jammed last weekend.

• track1.mp3
• track2.mp3
• track3.mp3

I picked up a used TonePort KB37 and am learning Ableton Live (albeit an older Lite version that came with the TonePort).  My condenser mic has a bipolar setting which I used on track3, but I had to crank the gain, giving me tons of noise.  I ended up editing the tracks down with Audacity; it’s open source, useful and stable.  For informal recording like this, recording straight into Audacity is probably easier.

I’m trying out Amazon S3 for hosting these files.  S3Fox, a Firefox plugin for managing S3 storage, made it easy to post the files.