For those of you have been following my horseback riding escapades, it’s been too hot to trot in recent weeks. An article on the front page of today’s Los Angeles Times has the California death toll at 130, higher than the deaths caused by the Northridge earthquake and fires combined. The effects of heat on multiple sclerosis are well documented and each MS-related publication is full of ads for these flack-jacket-like apparels with pockets in which you can insert ice-packs. I can’t imagine carrying around added weight of ice in this heat, but whatever works for those who need it is a good thing. Thankfully, I have air conditioning and, while surrounding neighborhoods have been hit with major power outages, my immediate vicinity has suffered nothing more than momentary interruptions. Of course such interruptions are supremely annoying for no sooner do I reset all the clocks and answering machine and re-boot my computer than another surge hits and I have to start all over again, but not worth complaining about in the face of others who are powerless for hours if not days on end. I have friends who have decamped to local movie theaters or the homes of friends and family.
So thankfully, my personal neural network has remained relatively cool. But such has not been the case at the data centers housing the servers on which my web sites reside. In addition to DevraDoWrite.com and DevraHall.com I also run Lushlife.com and a new site for Nancy Wilson that was to have launched already but has been set back by these power struggles. (More about Miss Nancy next week.) Status reports from my hosting service spoke of dead shorts, ram upgrades, over-taxed generators, core router upgrades, system disk problems, network cards gone bad, a broken Power Distribution Unit, and a filer crash causing a chain reaction heavily affecting other parts of the network and saturating network interfaces. That last one was on July 19th and nothing has been functioning properly since then…until now. Hope that I do not speak too soon; each problem report over these last ten days was followed by an “all fixed” report that was too good to be true. No, they weren’t telling tales, but the problems were cascading and no sooner was one thing fixed than another failed. It looks to be pretty stable now…I hope.
Enjoy your weekend — I know I will — and if I remain empowered, I will be back with you on Monday.