Personal

Ever since the server moved to a different city and platform, I suspect external web links have been broken due to some database cleanups/fixes I had to do to the data from the old server.

Previously, the blog would track exit clicks and tally them up. I'm a bit of a statistics geek so I always found that information interesting, but I'd rather have a working website than pretty graphs. I've removed that broken module for now.

I doubt I'll re-enable it because I don't like obfuscated web links in general. It is the same reason that any link I post in a blog entry has the tooltip set to the address of the web site linked.

Who knew downtime would be measured in weeks instead of minutes?

Who knew that the server this site was previously hosted on would die the night before the Vista consumer launch?

Normally, downtime of this site would not matter much overall, except that this website was featured in the Detroit Free Press article on the consumer Vista launch! I had my 15 minutes of fame in the paper for 2007, but a dead web link on print.

The primary reason for the downtime was a massive hardware failure of the original server.

I had backups of the database and webpage from January 19th and earlier, which meant I was missing 2 blog entries.

I could either travel a couple hundred miles and perform hardware necromancy on the old server or I could exploit the internet and grab cached versions of my webpage. I chose to manually recreate the entries in the the database, based off of versions that were found on Google's cache of the site.

Sometimes you have to get creative to restore your "hobby website". It had to take the backseat for a while due to everything else going on lately.

I'll be posting a backlog of entries soon when things settle down a bit. We're now a 4 cat household too.