Author: Christine

Christine is an Avenger of Sexiness. Her Superpower is helping Hot Mamas grow their Confidence by rediscovering their Beauty. She lives in the Heights in Houston, Texas, works as a boudoir photographer, and writes about running a Business of Awesome. In her spare time, she loves to knit, especially when she travels. She & her husband Mike have a food blog at Spoon & Knife.

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Something is Going Down…

Hmmm… something is going down here in downtown Houston – there are at least six news helicopters hovering overhead. Unfortunately, there isn’t any information on the Houston Chronicle or KHOU or KPRC sites yet to clue me in.

It’s a bit unsettling to see all of these helicopters just sitting there. What do I do? I grab my camera, of course! (I’ll post the photo tonight.)

Update: It was a high-speed chase of a stolen car that ended in downtown when they slammed into another car at McKinney and Smith. They tried to flee on foot, but they were caught, in part thanks to a bystander that helped. “He threw a forearm to the suspect as the suspect ran by him,” said HPD Officer James Price. “He fell into the scaffolding and that’s when I was able to catch him. He helped out tremendously.” (from the KHOU website.)

Amuse Me

Ok, But Who is Zed?

I was talking with Mike on the phone last night, and he told me all about this cool animated desktop background that he found which displays streaming letters – just like when they are watching the Matrix in the movie. I thought it sounded really cool and I wanted to check it out, so…
Me: Cool! Where did you find it at?
Him: (as I heard it) TheMatrix dot SourceForge dot Net.
Me: THE Matrix?
Him: No, THE Matrix.
Me: Huh? THE? Or Z as in zebra?
Him: Z as in Zebra. ZedMatrix dot SourceForge dot Net.
Me: What? Wait? Zed or Z? I’m so confused!
Him: Zed.
Me: But I thought you said Z?
Him: I did. But they call it Zed in Europe. Well, in England at least. But it’s Z. ZMatrix dot SourceForge dot Net.

Is that true? Do they really pronounce “Z” as “Zed” in England? And if they do – what’s up with that? Why? Why do we say “Zee” instead of “Zed” over here on this side of the pond? I’m determined to get to the bottom of this…

And I still think he was just making it up to mess with me. What is real?

Geek Love

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.)