Recent Posts

July 30, 2009

Ask-o-logy: Pardon the Interruption

Gentle Reader,

Before I write the next post, before I reply to your invigorating comments and emails, please let me explain my absence.

I've been busy -- buzzingly, boundingly busy. Five lovely hours spent being the witness at my friend's wedding followed by an Italian lunch on India Street, four visits to an ailing uncle in a nursing home, three weeks of a blessed dissertation stride (and almost done -- insert happy holler here!!), two out of town guests, one fun Saturday brunch, zero midnight confrontations with nocturnal prowlers (turned out to be a possum), and negative one blog posts. Meaning that I wrote and lost a bunch of files.

Yeah. About that...

For weeks I have been working on a soon-to-be new and improved Daily Asker site. I've done it mostly in the background, grabbing spare minutes and occasional afternoons to put together a format that would preserve the daily asking component and add a few new features I'm really excited about. Well, several days ago, with a few key keyboard strokes, I managed to make it disappear. Everything. The whole blog. All the new material. In its place came this horrific message:


I put everything else on hold. I started learning PHP and SQL, and ventured to the cold and damp corners of my server.

It wasn't pretty.

It was time to get professional help.

So I asked. I asked for advice and instructions and merciful enlightenment from various computer programming gurus.

Between writing to a forum, calling my hosting company, posting on craigslist to hire a code debugger for a reasonable fee, and asking Mr. A and his highly technical cousin if there's any hope, it finally dawned on me that maybe the simplest solution is to just restore the site to where it was, just before that fatal error.

That's where I am now. I've begged the hosting company to do that. We'll see if they have the data from August 2.

If that works, I'll be thrilled to unveil to you the new Daily Asker. If not... well, I guess I've learned my lesson. BACKUP UP NIGHTLY OR PREPARE TO GET ROYALLY F*CKED!!!!!!

Now, off to sleep. To dream of recovered blog posts, fluffy fat free cheesecake and other modern miracles.

And when I awake, I hope you'll join me for the end of ask-o-logy. "Who taketh away: A look at altruism and attitude."

Ever thine,

La Roxy
blog comments powered by Disqus