Ezra's blog

I still intend to write in more detail about the experience I've had with Apple where my computer was repaired and replaced many times over a year and a half. Until then, here is a video explanation:

Updated 9/15/2008

The artists listed here have been influential or otherwise important to me. This list is not in any kind of exact order and I haven't listed everyone, but it's probably safe to say that listening to each of them has been formative for me in some way. There are a few on this list that caught my attention but are less familair than the others I've listed. For some artists I have listed particular albums.

Joni Mitchell

Gillian Welch, David Rawlings

Chris Thile

Lucinda Williams

Chris Whitley

Leo Kottke

Derek Trucks (, band, and Susan Tedeschi)

Keith Jarrett (Koln)

Toumani Diabate (In the Heart of the Moon, New Ancient Strings)

Ali Farka Touré

Henry Butler

Corey Harris

Buddy and Julie Miller, Julie Miller, Buddy Miller

Bruce Molsky

John McLaughlin

Mahavishnu Orchestra

Shakti (Handful of Beauty)

Missisippi John Hurt

Jeff Beck (Especially Wired, Blow by Blow, with the Hammer Group Live)

Baaba Maal

Elliot Smith (XO)

Patty Griffin

Cary Ann Hearst

Muddy Waters

John Lee Hooker

Ladysmith Black Mambazo

Bob Dylan

Joan Baez

Alison Krauss and Union Station

Jerry Douglas

Dan Tyminksi

Ron Block

Barry Bales

   I tend to be skeptical when I see food that's advertised with phrases such as  "100% natural" or "exactly the way nature intended." That's because the word "natural" is often abused and overextended to include methods of producing (and distributing) food that are anything but natural.  Examples that come to mind include produce that is grown with industrial fertilizer and products from animals who live in inhumane conditions at factory farms where they are mutilated (their tails and beaks removed) and forced to eat foods that cause them digestive problems while they live literally in their own waste -- which becomes a major pollutant instead of being used as a natural fertilizer.

  When I think about an “ultimate standard” for natural agriculture, I usually think of Polyface Farms. Polyface was discussed extensively in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma,  a book that inspired major changes in the way I think about food. 

Am I going to Drupalcon Boston 2008? You can bet your hidndquarters I am. 

The sections of this tutorial are as follows:

• Brief background on ApacheBench and performance of Drupal Anonymous vs Authenticated Users
• Accessing the cookie containing the Drupal session ID
• Passing the session cookie to ApacheBench
• Verifying that the Drupal installation being benchmarked recognizes the cookie and is serving authenticated Pages

    ApacheBench, also known as 'ab', is a command line program bundled with the Apache Web Server that measures the performance of web servers by making HTTP requests to a user-specified URL. ApacheBench displays statistical information, such as the number of requests served per second and the amount of time taken to serve those requests, that is useful for evaluating (benchmarking) and tuning the performance of a webserver. ApacheBench does a decent job of simulating different types and levels of load on a sever.

It came to my attention recently that my tag cloud was more of a tag pile, since individual tags were not shown at different sizes based on the frequency of their use on this site. Since I fixed the tag cloud I see that "worthwhile websites" is the most frequently used tag. In the several months after I became more seriously interested in web development, I wrote brief blurbs about different websites I found worthwhile and tagged them as such. I don't write a blurb for every website that I think is worthwhile, and despite the fact that that tag for these blurbs is so prominently featured, they are not really intended to be a main feature of this site. Just throwing that out there...

It's over. I am breaking up with coffee.
[Queue idiomatic Country music breakup song backing.]