And Weingolb did shaketh

Going from bad to worse... much much worse

The jury still out on how this blog will recover but the diagnosis is now known, at least for the most part.

The first blow happened in the early hours Saturday morning, after the folks at Site Meter had packed it up and left up for the weekend. One of their servers, namely "sm1" (i.e. the one that this and many other blogs use to view their web traffic) went completely haywire.

Being the Internet peek-a-boo geek that I am, it was only a few hours after the incident occurred that I developed a fairly good idea of how seriously bad things were. What I mean is basically this:

Awake, 7 am...
1. Click bookmark for Weingolb site meter, as part of usual morning routine
2. Wait approx. 30 seconds (odd, that)
3. Read an unfortunate message, obviously meant for administrators at Site Meter, that involves error 'ASP 0113' wherein a script apparentally times out
4. Refresh
5. Repeat steps 1 to 4 in vain

Okay, I get the message that this ain't gonna work. My visitor logs will have to exist without my explicit awareness, causing me to go off and ponder whether the tree that falls in a forest when no one is around makes a sound . . . Fed up with that ruse I choose to restart my computer, just for kicks. It could work, couldn't it?

And so I power down and watch the last signs of life flicker from my computer. Little do I know that these final flashes and whirs are indeed the last ones for a very long time, possibly forever. (Just for kicks -- more like getting kicked while you're down.)

It's my hard disk. It's now in the shop (along with the rest of my iBook) being tinkered with and I'm expecting the worst.

No site meter. No site. Or at least no site for me. I can tell my blog still exists though. I may not be able to visit it myself but I've gotten comments over the weekend. This means I know it exists. And, well, of course there's the fact that I've actually posted this entry to my blog by borrowing a friend's laptop. Yup, the Internet is still there. I'm just reaching out and touching it in a different way. During lunchhours at work. Other unnamed stolen moments, like this one ;)

But as many of you may know, I mainly post from notes recorded over the previous month. My drafts, tasting notes, photos and the like that I have been working on are suddenly gone. This combined with the fact that my friend has a Windows laptop makes me less than keen on posting interim entries. Not having a site meter in place pretty much seals the deal. What can I say?

So stay tuned for updates, folks! I do hope that they are coming soon. In the meantime, I suggest you direct your attention to Midnight Poutine, which is what I will be doing over the next couple of days.