The Book Tower

I’m finally back on line after a few frustrating blogless days. Thanks to Jack Pickard for being the first person to spot that something was up (well, he is the web chemist).

I’ve lost about a week of posts and comments, but I’ve managed to find them (thank heavens I subscribe to my own feed – which is continuing to act as if nothing has happened – and even though I’d deleted comments from my inbox I discovered I hadn’t yet emptied the ‘deleted’ folder).

I realised that it wasn’t really the end of the world earlier this week when I was listening to a programme on the radio on the way into work about a man who had been kidnapped. He was chained up in a dark hole for four months with only a candle for company and kept himself sane by counting the slugs on the wall. Oh yes, and he was periodically covered in chicken droppings. It sort of put things into context.

The only thing that niggled me (about the blogless experience that is, not the kidnapped man – who had come out of it surprisingly chirpy) was that I had to really badger my hosting company before they told me what was up. Eventually they confessed to a catastrophic cock-up:

We have had to rebuild both the raid drives on the hard disks which takes several hours a disk, then the disks have to be reformatted and the drives totally rebuilt and configured.
This would not normally be a problem, but this is a freak incident which has affected the backup drive as well, which has meant we couldnt swap to it.
This also means that we are dealing with 3 drives as opposed to 1 which increases the time span as well.
There are over 800 customers on that server which is why it is imperative for us to get the servers up and running as fast as we can. But the problems that the drives are having are time consuming resolves and we cannot speed up computer processes.
We again are very sorry for the problems that have been caused.

The later messages became very grovelling indeed.

At least 799 other pissed off people! Maybe I should start a forum for disgruntled webmasters. I’ll know where not to host it…