Thursday, 17 November 2005, 12:09:18 EST

First, a small update about this site. I have implemented gzip compression on the RSS/Atom feed. The feed, for the month of November thus far, accounts for 75% of the requests (510) for PHP files on this site. The requests for PHP files total (672) this month is 29.2% of all file types requested. Basically, that is about 4.9MB of traffic this month for the feed by itself. Sure, I have a lot of bandwidth to work with but I would prefer to squash this problem sooner rather than later. This change could be "bad," though. I have no way of knowing if all the aggregators that request the feed support gzip compression. So, if you are getting garbage in your aggregator let me know and I will implement the change a little more robustly (i.e. actually check to see if the client supports gzip compression before sending it compressed data). I will also be compressing all of the other pages on the site but you all shouldn't notice any difference (other than faster load times) there; all modern browsers support the feature.

On to something a little more interesting. Last Saturday I went to Best Buy with my room mate because, well, we were bored. I managed to prevent myself from buying Guitar Hero (narrowly) but I didn't walk out of the store empty handed. I wandered into the music section, specifically the "Dance" section, and came across Tiësto's latest album — In Search Of Sunrise 4: Latin America. It was an acceptable $15.00 for two CDs worth of Tiësto goodness so I decided to get it to refresh my exercise music. I listened to the first CD Monday and the second on Wednesday during my workouts. The first one isn't very good exercise music. It is a good CD, but it can only be described as "pretty." At about twenty-eight minutes into the album, it picks up the tempo for a couple minutes but then relaxes back into pretty mode. The second disc is much better workout music; it starts off with a nice, upbeat, tempo and it continues on through the album. Actually, about fifty minutes into the mix it relaxes a little bit and finishes off the last twenty or so minutes in a peaceful groove. Perfect. It is around that time when I start my cool down and don't really need the up-tempo beats. As for the music, it isn't all latin beats and such as the name would imply. The name is just a tribute to the part of the world the DJ has enjoyed the most in his tours. There are some latin beats scattered around the mixes but they fit well. Overall, I am not as fond of this album as I am of his previous album, Parade Of The Athletes. That album was much livelier than this this one. This one is still quite good though and I recommend getting it if you are a Tiësto fan.

I realize I haven't been posting a lot recently. I have been so busy with school and work that when I get a free minute I don't feel like writing. I just want to relax and not think for a while. But, I do have a couple of things that I want to write about and will be doing that over the next couple of days. Well, at least one more thing; the other is escaping me at the moment.

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