When I upgraded my Web server from MySQL 4 to MySQL 5, a change in date behavior broke my blog (and the other blogs hosted on the site) for a couple of days. I thought I'd gotten it fixed, but I just discovered that all of the blog archives subsequent to that day were broken.

It was a ten-minute fix to change the code and alter the databases to reflect the change, after months of silent brokenness.

All's well that ends well, I guess.

Update: It would really help if I could remember that the date/time stamp for each post automatically updates to the current time unless I explicitly tell it not to, so as to avoid setting every damn entry to the same date and time whenever I make a change to all the records. Thank goodness for twice-daily backups.

Warning: political analysis ahead.

I've been seeing this type of sentiment in a number of places since Tuesday:

Angered over the way the Florida and Michigan delegates were divided by the party's hierarchy over the weekend, Horbal said she - and others - will urge feminists to write in Clinton's name on the presidential ballot in November.

Let's just see what happens if we undo the compromise from the "party's hierarchy" and give Clinton exactly what she was demanding from Saturday's Rules and Means committee meeting, shall we? In the real world, at the end of Tuesday's primaries, Obama had 2,134 delegates, and Clinton had 1,919.

The Florida and Michigan compromises halved the number of delegate votes and gave Obama a total of 126 delegates (33.5 and 29.5 delegate votes per state, respectively), and Clinton a total of 174 delegates (52.5 and 34.5 delegate votes). Subtracting out the "compromise" delegate votes from those states, that reduces Obama to 2,071 delegates and Clinton to 1,832.

Now let's add back exactly what Clinton asked for: full seating of each state's delegates, with completely proportional representation of her votes in Michigan (i.e. not moving those four "stolen" delegates over to Obama), and no "uncommitted" delegates being seated for Obama. This results in 178 delegates for Clinton (105 FL and 73 MI), and 67 for Obama (67 FL and 0 MI).

So ultimately we end up with a grand total of 2,010 delegates for Hillary Clinton... and 2,138 for Barack Obama. The numbers have changed, but the outcome remains the same: Hillary Clinton still wouldn't have managed to reach the "magic number" of 2,118 delegates; and while Obama's delegate lead was reduced from 215 to 128, he still indisputably came out ahead.

So can we retire that canard about the Rules and Means Committee "stealing" the nomination from Hillary Clinton? Please?

My first post-college job was at a credit union, and I immediately took advantage of the low loan interest rates to buy a Kurzweil K1000 SE II keyboard. The thing was built like a tank - 55 pounds of metal and sturdy plastic - and served me well for years and years. Even though music technology left many of its patches sounding weak and dated, it remained a spectacular MIDI input device, with nicely weighted, velocity-sensitive keys; channel aftertouch; pitch/modulation/expression controllers and more.

But after a storm knocked out our power this past week, it refused to boot up. Diagnostic tests failed on the memory, timer, UART and other essential things. Time for a new keyboard, alas.

I settled on an M-Audio Axiom 61 MIDI controller. Without an onboard sound module, it's much less expensive than a real synthesizer or sampler, so there's that. It's also got a better response curve on velocity and aftertouch, a number of assignable sliders, knobs and buttons, velocity-sensitive trigger pads, and weighs about a fifth of the K1000.

On the downside, the K1000 had 76 keys, so I'm still getting used to having fewer of them (I especially miss the eight at the bottom). The feel is also different; the keys are weighted differently, and the aftertouch response is vastly dissimilar.

The K1000's aftertouch didn't provide you with any real tactile feedback; you pressed the key all the way down, and the harder you pressed against the key after it stopped moving, the more aftertouch you got. But with the Axiom 61, the key continues to move, albeit with more resistance, to provide you with an idea of how much aftertouch you're generating. To me, this feels like the keys are mushy or bendy, which will take a little getting used to.

The other weird thing is that the Axiom's keys feel closer together, and more cramped than the K1000's. Yet according to my dial calipers, they're exactly the same width, and exactly the same spacing.

Perhaps one day I can resurrect the K1000. I hate to toss it on the trash heap, since it served me so well for so long.

Dennis Kucinich is on C-SPAN right now, reading out articles of impeachment against President George W. Bush.

Huh.

Large Hardon Collider.