crows to burnaby

Monday I was working from home, and noticed with increasing frustration that the web server seemed to be crapping out repeatedly. It'd be up for several minutes, flake out again for a few, come back for a while, and finally it seemed to die for good. I try not to snark at my hosting provider right away - usually they already know if something's wrong and are trying to fix it, and they don't really need me to nag at them - but after an afternoon of interrupted work I finally called them up around 5:00pm. They said that the servers themselves were okay, but there was some kind of connectivity problem at the datacenter. They're based near Toronto, and the owner (a friendly guy) suggested that since I'm in Vancouver myself I could try giving the system a kick.

It took a few minutes on the phone before it dawned on me that maybe there was a connection between my server outage, and the news story I'd read only minutes before, about how there'd been a fire underground in the electrical system downtown, and most of Vancouver's business district had been without power since the morning. I asked "Uh, where exactly is that datacenter?" The owner said, "Something called... Harbour Centre?" "Yeah... yeah... that could be the problem."

I gather they're still trying to repair the damage to the power cables, but luckily enough the servers came back to life less than an hour after that conversation. Good thing, because I get a little twitchy when I can't check my email for a while.

Still, it amuses me that the power was out downtown for seven or eight hours before I even knew about it. I guess that's the drawback to freelancing... it's easy to get lost in your own little world.

BTW, if anyone's looking for web design and solid XHTML/CSS work, with a side salad of web accessibility, social network knowledge and copywriting capabilities, I am accepting new projects again. Portfolio and more info at outsideinthesun.com.