JV at the Tokyo International Audio Show

Looks like JV got to go to the Tokyo International Audio show 2015. Japan, the home of the most avid audiophiles in the world.

Tokyo HiFi Show

In some ways, this exhibit-by-invitation-only show is interesting because of which non-Japan manufacturers got invited [I know I am simplifying things, but let’s continue].

Vivid (South Africa), Avantgarde, Lansche Einstein and a few others from Germany; Magico, Rowland from the U.S., Piega from Switzerland, …

… and then how familiar and ubiquitous the brands from Japan are here in the U.S.

Anyway, their show report was an enjoyable read.

For us, it is this show, Hong Kong, and, of course, the Munich show are the ones that are ascendant… Poor old CES [which is to say… see you at CES in a few months! :-)]

MediaTemple problems

This is not so much an audio post and more a post giving a ‘heads up’ to people wanting to host their blog, a blog with lots of photos anyway, on MediaTemple.

A year ago, about 4 or 5 days after RMAF as the traffic to the show report was at its highest, the host for our website (MediaTemple) started generating (503 service unavailable) errors.

This went on for about 2 months, me thinking they were going to fix their site and they swinging from clueless to blaming it on us.

At some point I finally decided to track the performance of our site on their system using pingdom.com

 

SCXMA6~R

 

You can see how we might every so often be deluded into thinking they had fixed things.

On December 15th or so we moved to Linode. A little more technical work on my part, but twice as fast [about 0.3ms response time], cheaper and it only goes down a few minutes every few months for security updates [or when I muck something up real bad :-)].

The fact that this started happening when we were serving on the order of 10GB of photos/day during a show report is, one might think, interesting. Were we ‘tagged’ as using too much bandwidth [supposedly we had *unlimited* bandwidth there] and this is there way of getting us to leave? Same thing happened to us, on Lunarpages, where we were also kind of invited to leave because of the growth in our website [by shutting our site down for a few days for using too much CPU. We were there for 10 years and it was great while it lasted] .  Neither place offered us an upgrade path. Probably just trying to go for the low hanging fruit websites that just get a few visitors per month and out of laziness try and get the rest of us to go somewhere else.

Anyway, audiofederation.com has been here almost a year now – so far so good!