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.

When you next feel like being lightly amused, please check out One Song Per Station, a fun little concept developed while the band was on tour and noticed the increasing tendency of radio stations to play fewer and fewer songs more and more often. We figured someone had to take it to the logical extreme - it's what the people want!

Anyways... enjoy.

if you like, say, Tetris.

Because you might like this one too.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

Project Opus has long been one of my favourite music communities. It's Vancouver-developed, and though the scope of the site isn't limited to Vancouver at all, there's a bit of an emphasis on local music just by default.
The developers have just released Mixx, a very clever Facebook app that allows you to not just make typical playlists of your favourite songs, but request songs from friends based on themes: "I want music that will wake me up in the morning", "I want music that makes the rain go away", and so on. It's quite legal, because although you're uploading an mp3 to the site, it can only be heard by your friends and they can't download it - basically as if they were hanging out at your place and you had it playing on your stereo.

I like this concept a lot, because I find the only times I get into new music is when a friend recommends it and I look it up. This skips the "looking it up" step altogether.

It's an addictive little app - I had to force myself to go to bed the other night when I was having too much fun putting together a Mixx of music that I was finding particularily resonant (starting with "Go Slowly" by Radiohead). There'll be more where that came from. Do check it out.

Someday we'll sit around and reminisce about the old days in which Facebook forced you to use "is" in status updates, but right now it looks like the revolution is upon us.

Hooray! Now people will stop inviting me to join that petition group.