Month: May 2003

In Good Company…

On a side note, if your site has to be down, at least go down with the best, right? InstaPundit (hosted with Hosting Matters) was offline too, and according to Kathy K, he was posting on his backup Blogspot site. Solonor (hosted with Bloggerzone) was kind enough to share visual evidence of how long the site was down. Meanwhile, Michele claims it was really her doing – a powerful Jedi Mind Trick gone wrong.

At least it wasn’t as stressful for me as the Great Blogout of 2002 (see the April 4th post). We were so desparate then that we had to set up a Blogaholics site. This hit more people, but at least I knew what was going on and it was just a matter of waiting it out!

Have details to share from the Great Blogout of 2003? What did you do with all of the spare time you suddenly found yourself with today?

Geek Love

Remember Me?

From about 9:30am this morning until an hour or so ago, Blogomania, a lot of the Blogomania client sites (five out of seven servers), and all of my personal sites were offline. No e-mail, no blogs, nothing. At first I thought it was my wonky connection through my ISP, but it wasn’t. Oh no, it was much bigger than that. It seems that NAC, the huge data center that stores servers for a number of hosting companies had a rather unusual situation on their hands today. Here’s the full scoop:

At 10:20 am EST this morning, we had a component failure in the UPS at our Site B co-location facility in Parsippany, NJ. We had no warning of this failure, and we are currently investigating the cause. This failure triggered the fire alarms and the fire suppression system, and caused the UPS unit to drop all power to Site B. In addition, because this failure caused the fire alarms to be set off, the entire building had to be evacuated while the fire department investigated. NAC personnel worked with the fire department to ensure the building environment was safe to re-enter.

Some of the core switching equipment in Parsippany was affected by this UPS failure and power outage and had to be moved to a backup power system. At approximately 12:00pm EST the fire department allowed all personal to re-enter the building. … We are currently assessing any on-going issues, but most services have been restored. We will post an additional update as more information becomes available.

Blogomania has clients on five servers – Themis, Zephyros, Clio, Calliope and Artemis – at this location. Clients on the other two servers – Iris and Selene – are in Florida, where all of the servers are eventually migrating. Sort of like birds, heading South!

Thanks to Jennifer and Erika for helping me to spread the word about the situation. It is a rather helpless feeling when you are dealing with a situation like this that is so absolutely out of your control, and I’m so thankful to finally be back online!

Geek Love

New Kid on the Block!

Ok, more like an old kid with a new name and a new look – for the PHP lovers out there, WordPress, the new official branch of b2, is now available for download.

Kudos to Matt for a job well done. I can’t wait to test the latest version, and I’m proud of my very minor role in all of it.

Trust me, this one is going places. Keep an eye on it!

(In case you wondered, it will run at Blogomania and has already been tested on our servers.)

BlahBlahBabble

Liberation!

How on earth did I end up with so much stuff? When I moved in to my current apartment back in 2000, I didn’t have time to go through everything I wanted to toss out before I moved. Unfortunately, most of it was packed up in boxes then and moved along with me, stuck in the back of Jason’s closet and left to sit for two and a half years.

Until this weekend. This weekend, I cleaned. I cleaned, and cleaned some more. I ignored the computer, neglected my e-mail, didn’t read a single blog after noon on Saturday. (Thank you to Mike for all of his incredible help!) I cleaned. I still had to go through the boxes slowly though, as some had photos randomly stuck in the middle, or old paycheck stubs and bank statements. I have moved out over eight boxes worth of stuff so far, and kept one consolidated box. From some boxes I only kept a small stack of papers. Others, more. But everything was thoroughly purged and sent off to be recycled.

Old school papers from Jason’s days in Kindergarten were probably the hardest thing to throw away. I saved a few, but most of them are gone now. I can’t save everything he ever did – if I did, my house would be overflowing. The special things are worth holding on to for now.

The easist thing to throw out were the old papers I had printed. It seems that at one point in time back in 1998-1999 I was convinced that I had to print the entire Internet. I found articles from WebReview and other sites in the boxes, things that are still online today. Tips to do things like how to create websites in frames (*shiver*) and CSS tutorials that I never read because they made my eyes bleed. Amazing amounts of stuff, all off to the paper recycling bin now because I can find it all online if I need it. Funny how the Internet has changed things like that, isn’t it?

It’s incredible how much stuff we can end up with if we try to hold on to everything. It is very liberating when you let it go.

Amuse Me

You Talkin’ to Me?

It seems that Starbucks has an issue with people taking photographs in their stores. I wonder what they would say if they knew I renamed my site last summer based on their Big Pink Cookies? How about the fact that I have a small collection of Big Pink Cookie photos? I took this one on Wednesday at the Starbucks at the Park Shops in downtown. Oops!

Your challenge, if you’re willing to accept it – take photos of the Big Pink Cookies at your local Starbuck(s) and share them with me. They’re back in season now, and I want to see your Big Pink Cookies! Are you up to it?