Hey -- we're back from the dark part of the world -- the North Rim of the Grand Canyon -- where there was no service for internet or cellphones. And with our return comes some good news. First of all -- here's the text of a message from Dan at the company that hosts the site. This is what notice I got a few days ago:
"Some time ago we partnered with a certain datacenter, which was stable, reputable, and had a long track record. After this economic storm hit, the company ran into a lot of trouble. We had already known there were internal issues, and started to move our entire network to another datacenter.
Unfortunately, we still have a few systems with the old provider - and they have now given us notice that we have until Sept. 30 to get everything out before they close.
So we will end up having to bite the bullet and eat a little down time while the changes take place and propagate. It will take anywhere from 2 to 48 hours.
The good news is you will have a high-level, fully redundant computing platform that will outperform this server by roughly 5:1.
We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
Thank you for your business."
And so now that Nancy and I have telephone again I just got off the line with Dan, and he explained about how all 29 of the sites he was hosting using this datacenter were farkled. As I remember -- he hosts the Hayabusa site, too. And so now that things are doing better -- he took the time to explain that the NEW datacenter is a "cloud" center -- so shouldn't be subject to this kind of outage in the future (yeah, we'll see, hey?).
So Dan and Bob Clancy have got stuff done, like putting up the little fake page that at least lets you get to the Forum. And when Bob gets home form his day job this afternoon he and Dan will work on getting the rest of the site back in order.
And sooner or later they'll get around to finishing up getting email working for Nancy and me again -- which is through our own site (nancyandjon.org) and has password and other issues to resolve.
So - it's getting all better and we'll be back in time for World Finals, they promise. Dang -- one of you had the right idea, that with the site off the air I could concentrate better on Nancy's next record attempts. Oh, well, I'll concentrate on other things about Nancy instead. Did I tell you we're going to the "Biggest Tattoo Show of Earth" in Las Vegas tomorrow? Gotta get some new ideas for her. Visit
http://www.tattooexpo09.com/ and see all about it.
Finally -- thanks for hanging in there with us. We'll see you on the salt.