Monday 24 September 2007

Crash and burn

At work today with no email, no access to most of my work, and no real idea when the system will be back up again.

Bollocks.

Got in after a slow and tiresome, windswept and rainy drive across Salisbury Plain (stuck behind a fucking convoy of tank transporters for much of it) to be greeted by an office full of glum faces and blank screens. More so than normal for a Monday morning, I mean.

About half an hour ago (4 hours after most people arrived at work) there was an announcement on the building Tannoy that "the service is down". This was greeted by ironic cheers and a round of applause, which made me laugh. Rumour control means that we now know that the server "blew up" after it was switched on, that many of our sites are affected and that the engineers are working on it. Using their feet, I assume, useless bleeding chimps that they are.

My money's on getting email back by lunchtime tomorrow at the earliest. So the office is emptying as more and more people decide to head home. Presumably to do something more useful than stare at the internet all day, wishing they could email people.

The site here is covered in fallen branches - loads of the big horse chestnut trees seem to have suffered badly in the storm last night. A very dour security guard was dragging the branches off the road into a heap. I could almost hear him thinking "This isn't in my fucking job description" as I drove past him.

While I think about it, and following the question on Mr Farty's blog about comments, does the fact that comments moderation is switched on for this site bother anyone?

I set it up that way because:

a) I refuse to have anyone write comments that might be far more amusing than my blog, and it's my site and I am the ubergruppenbloggenovermeister, so there

b) I don't want anything untoward being posted that I might not spot quickly enough

c) It makes me feel special having to moderate comments

So. If the moderation thing doesn't put you off too much, feel free to share your views. And I guess if there are no comments that is an answer in itself.

If you see what I mean.

The burn still hurts, by the way.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

On the comment moderation... you can import a Blogger blog lock, stock and many smoking barrels to Wordpress. They have a tool in set up specially for it. Even imports comments.

They also have better comment moderation but I find I don't need it as you can do several things to sort out errant comments. You can block someone's I.P. address so that they can't leave and further comments (from the same I.P. address). You can send to moderation comments with a specified number of hyper-links. You can also set up a block list of words/names so that any comments with your choice of words go to moderation. All this doesn't even seem to be necessary though as their Akismet spam filtering wipes out 99.5% of them on it's own. Thus I've only ever had to delete 2 comments in 6/8 months, Akismet sorting out over 600 duds on it's own.
Anyway, I sound like a bloody Wordpress evangelist now.

livesbythewoods said...

Hey hello bbb, nice to see you here. Thanks for that, I am absolutely crap at tech stuff (it took me months to work out how to do even the most basic stuff) so I will probably stick with blogger for now as I feel like I have at least half a chance of not breaking my blog.

However. Time will tell, and if I feel brave I might have a go at emigrating across.

I've only had to moderate out one comment in 6 months so far (some fuckwit spammer) so truth be told, I don't know that I need to worry too much.

Devon said...

I would leave moderation on... I actually like it, because then when my comment shows up, I at least know it was read. Plus it takes away the worry of posting something by mishap that might be inappropriate ;)

livesbythewoods said...

Hello Devon, long time no speak!

I read all the comments, and it hadn't occurred to me that moderating them would demonstrate that. But it does, so I'm sold.

It stays.