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I was pretty late to the game with RSS and RSS Readers. I knew what they were and how they were supposed to work, but I tried one several years ago and it was clunky, so I never really tried it again. Several months ago while I was messing around with the BlackBerry, I downloaded Google’s Mobile Pack. Google Reader was part of the update. I logged in just to check it out. The rest is pretty much history.

At work I am expected to know pretty much every Internet fad. It is kinda hard to keep up with everything and get other real things done. I got to where my morning blog/news regiment took about an hour. With Google Reader, I was able to read the same sites and cut the routine down to about 15 minutes. I’ve since added a ton of new feeds so it still takes longer, but I am able to skim things much more quickly.

The best thing about Google Reader is the share feature. Once you add friends through gmail’s chat function, you can share articles with your friends just by clicking on a single button. It is really quite amazing. In the past couple of weeks, they’ve added a “share with notes” feature that allows you to comment on why you are sharing a particular article. Google Reader can even create a RSS feed frommy shared items. This is what I use to power the “What I Am Reading Online” section on the right.

To prove that I have gone overboard, I just installed a plugin that will automatically display all the plugins that I have installed. It can be found on the credits page.

I would have written about the resolution earlier, but then my website went down. I’ve included the official notice below, but basically they lost everything that was not in a database. That means unless I can find the original version on my laptop, I will have lost years worth of photos/images, as well as various hand-coded HTML pages. Fortunately, the DB is still intact, so after a WordPress reinstall, the GEAS.com blog is back up and running. The other frustrating part is that my site was down long enough that it appears to have been delisted from Google. I think it will come back in a few days, but I am not really sure. (Yes, I will likely change hosting companies after this, but I guess there’s no real hurry since I pay a year in advance and they already have my money.)

Also this week, the fan stopped running on my laptop. When I took it to get it fixed, I found out that the extended warranty that I had purchased had just expired 6 days earlier. Fortunately, they said they would still cover it. Thank you, Apple.

Globat, you have a lot to learn.

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Tom Cox <cs_manager2@globat.com>
to
date Thu, May 22, 2008 at 9:37 PM
subject Notice of Disk Failure on Globat.com Web Server

Dear Samuel,

On Saturday, May 17, 2008 Globat.com experienced a partial disk failure on a storage device attached to two of our web servers. Normally a disk failure is not catastrophic. Unlike most home PCs our web servers use a storage technique that allows for a drive to fail without loss of data.

The disk failed completely at some point during the night and we switched over to the backup storage device. After the failure and switching to the backup server, we began to discover that the backup procedure had been corrupted by the earlier partial disk failure and some sites had no backup available.

The backup process “copied” the data from the failed storage server to the backup server and essentially deleted the files on numerous websites before the error was detected. We think that your website was among these.

Most of the dynamic data including all email files, addresses books and all database files were not affected by this incident. The server is back online and running normally again and you can restore your website by uploading a backup copy of your website files. We are extremely sorry for this incident and our Technical Support will try to answer questions related to getting your site back online.

If by some chance you don’t have a current backup copy of your website files handy please consider these possible sources:
1. If you originally used a website designer they should have a copy. Most website
designers keep copies of the work they have done for clients.
2. You may have a copy on an older computer or stored CD.
3. Your site may be archived on the Internet.
4. You may have an older, non-current backup copy.

If none of these are possible, we can install a temporary page to explain that the files have been lost. Please contact our Technical Support department and we will see if there is anything we can do to help to get your site back online.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused you. Our attempts to identify the full scope of the problem, and those impacted, were hindered by the loss of data. We are in the process of creating several procedures to improve our recovery efforts for this type of problem in the unlikely event of it happening again.

Sincerely,
Tom Cox
Director of Customer Service
Globat.com

On a side note, I don’t really like posting photos in Facebook. I had rather use my Flickr account. But posting to Facebook makes it easier to share with groups on Facebook.

I called the cable company and while I was on the phone, they sent a couple new signals to the apt. Neither worked. Now they have to send a technician out to take a look. That means I’ll be without Internet access at home until at least Thursday. Also, I’ll have to take off work for them to come.

The same thing happened with my home phone a couple of years ago and I decided that it was easier (and cheaper) to turn off my home phone than to bother getting it fixed (especially when in that specific case, I was 100% certain that the phone company had disconnected my line when a neighbor moved out.)

In this case, there are several possible causes:
- several neighbors moved out yesterday
- they are doing construction all over my building
- there’s a good deal of street work surrounding my building
- there’s already a major issue with my account where they double billed me for several months

I kinda feel like the issue is limited to my account, or I think someone else would have posted something in the lobby of the building. I also don’t really think it is related to the billing issue b/c they would have noticed that when I was on the phone with them, or at least you would think.

Needless to say, I am going through Internet withdrawl and the BlackBerry is not giving me my fix.

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Posted via BlackBerry.