Thanks for your understanding!

Ben

My apologies for our outage for the last 5 days. Not that it was my fault, but I still feel bad about it. I know many of you have missed your “org fix” as one person wrote to me in email. In case you didn’t get the mail I sent out (some people seem not to have — reminder, check the email address the org has on file for you!), we were down starting last Saturday night, due to an electrical fire and subsuquent explosion (!) where our servers are hosted, in Texas, at theplanet.com. This was a catastrophic failure for their power systems, and while things like a normal power cut, would not have caused any problem, an explosion destroying much of their underground wiring, certainly did Over 9,000 servers were affected, approximately 7,000 customers, including, of course, our beloved org. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the fire and explosion!

The folks at theplanet.com worked round the clock for days to restore power, and finally restored it to all the servers about a day ago. The org wouldn’t come right back up, however, and after some manual intervention on their part, we were able to return to service about 6 hours ago. My thanks to the good folks at The Planet, and I really appreciate everyone’s patience while we waited for them to slog through the repairs. It’s great to be back!!

Please understand if the site is down for a while, and it may also take time for your ISP to update their DNS cache (i.e., to point to the new site’s address). Best case, that takes only a few minutes, but worst case, a couple of days.

Anyhow, I’ll try to have meaningful messages posted up on the old site as I make progress.

Ben

If all goes well, within a week or so we should be all migrated to the new machine, however, which I think will be a noticeable speed improvement, so it’s all for a good cause!

Thanks for your understanding,
Ben

Now, don’t get me wrong, the song is funky as hell, probably one of the best tracks in recent years. but… it sounds like the lyrics might be trying to dis us.

So… is he trying to end hostilities, or take it to the next level? Who knows, this is Prince we’re dealing with. Obviously, the end to this story hasn’t been written yet… although we do seem to be proving the theory that his greatest music comes from being pissed off!

Here’s a small excerpt–but there is much more in the full article:

But recently — in part because of backlash among users and advocacy groups who say copyright holders are abusing the law and wrongfully taking down content — the challenges to these copyright claims also appear to be increasing.

“These companies are trying to shoot a mouse with an elephant gun,” said Gigi Sohn, director of Public Knowledge, a public-policy think tank that focuses on intellectual property. “They like to accuse their customers, the music fans and TV fans out there, of not respecting the law, but I don’t think they respect the law.”

We feel the same way, especially with the sloppiness of WebSheriff’s slapdash and ridiculously broad DMCA request. I hadn’t thought of actually suing them over it, but now that I see some folks are going for it, it’s something to consider. Interesting stuff!