So the web server was down all weekend.

I came home at 6:00 a.m. Saturday morning to find the power in my living room off. This happens frequently because we blow fuses while running to A/C units in the apartment. Normally, if I’m around to replace the fuse, I can do so before the UPS battery dies on the server. However, if I were say, out partying until 6:00 a.m., well…I don’t fix it in time and the server goes down.

Saturday morning however, it didn’t want to come back up. It appears like the motherboard died for some reason.

I was in no state to fix it at 6:00 a.m., so I went to bed for a few hours…then got up at about 11:30 to reports that it was supposed to be like 105 degrees and 80% humidity or some such nonsense. So phone calls were made, a handle of tequila was purchased, and off to the beach we went…

I got home from the beach at 10:30 p.m. or so, and didn’t want to work on it then either. So I went to bed.

When I woke up Sunday morning, they were predicting another scorching hot sonofbitch day. So I went and had breakfast with a friend, went to the gym, and then retreated to a cool swimming hole with an awesome, frighteningly high rope swing. We stayed there until we got hungry, and moved to another park with grills where we grilled some chicken breasts and corn. Stayed there until about 6:00 p.m. then came back to town, got dressed (in clean, dry clothes) and went to Margaritas for a beer. One turned into two, which turned into 4 at 3 different bars….and the next thing I knew it was 11:30 p.m….so we all went home and went to bed.

I realize this was gross negligence of the server and all that…but hey, priorities man. Let’s see here, tequila, girls in bikini’s, and a DJ on the beach or working on a web server? I’m sure you can understand. The growing pains of your webmaster getting an actual life…go figure…

Anyway. Today I’ve moved the disks back into our old server and booted it up, and it started with no problems…so here we are. Slightly slower than previously, but stable and functional again.

So we went hiking again last night, making that 3 time in one week. That also makes it by far the most exercise I’ve got in one week in oh, say 3 or 4 years.

Today, we’re going kayaking on the Farmington river, as it is currently flowing like a bastard and has broken it’s banks in some spots.

Tomorrow or tonight, I’m going to get the Cannondale out of storage, fix the front tire, and get back on that as well. The motivation from that comes from several sources, not the least of which is Joel Young, the person who’s life I’ve been obsessively reading the last few days. It’s a pretty great blog.

I hate to say it, because it hasn’t happened yet, but this could be the summer I actually get back to a level of fitness where I can run up my office stairs without weezing for 5 minutes.

Check out the archives for April. The link is at the top right of the page. Notice how the chronology reverses and you read from the first post of April forward instead of having to scroll to the bottom of a page and read up like you do on most blogs? Pretty cool huh? Not really, unless you’re a dork. But hey, I take what I can get. It at least makes it easier for someone to read the whole blog from the beginning, should they want to bore themselves that way.

So, after reading about Blogshares over on AntSaint’s blog, I decided it was a pretty cool idea, and that I would go ahead and join up. I mean, what could be better than yet another reason to obsess over The Blogs

My blog isn’t being actively traded yet, but it should be soon once it’s indexed. You can check out it’s valuation (which will be very small, if anything) right here.

So, anyone reading this…link to me and make me money please!

Oh, and Ant - I just bought some shares in your blog.

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Update 10:49pm:

This could get really bad. I can only imagine that it is a bad sign that I’m currently trying to stay awake until I can sell my shares in AntSaints blog. It turns out I purchase them on the wrong blog entry. (Ant - you should submit all the alternative URLS’s for your site to “http://www.AntSaint.com/ant/” entry. You currently have 2 entries I’ve found, one that I just mentioned, and one here “http://AntSaint.typepad.com/ant/”) I purchased my shares on the second one, which was much more undervalued since there hasn’t really been much activity on it.

This is a pretty sweet game, albeit, perhaps the geekiest thing I’ve ever participated in.

It’s pretty crazy how much all this blog action has changed The Tribe. I’ve always spent some time working on the website during most normal work days…and spent the rest of the time just browsing the rest of the web. (Kidding…kidding…seriously…)

But really, the last week or so…I pretty much have given up on the rest of the internet, and just study the blogs. The links from the blogs, the comments on the blogs and their associated links, the google indexes for various blog pages, the log files from the blogs…everything….it’s madness I tell you.

The really killer thing about it, is that now we sit two weeks into the blog experiment here at The Tribe, and already there is a quite impressive amount of associative information. You can read just links from the blogs, never using a web search engine, and at a browsing depth of 1 (meaning you read only the blogs themselves, or links from them, not links from links from the blogs…or so on) it still takes an incredible amount of time.

That is one of the reasons I don’t worry about The Tribe proper having any problems transitioning to the blogs and dealing with it while maintaining it’s cohesiveness. We can all kinda pingback and trackback each others more or less private blogs, and still have a cohesive, chronologically correct discussion of a topic. Only each individual author basically gets to decide the entire look and feel of their post.

Not only that, the blogs connect The Tribe into the web in a way the message board, since it was non-indexed for obvious reasons, never would have. (PS: If anyone wants to know how to keep their blog from showing up in google, I can show you.)

So, yeah I’m buzzed and spend way too much time on the internet, on this website, or while thinking about this website or the internet in general…or everything in general…or something….

A few little updates and random things I want to throw out there..

Seems like the filter I put in to automatically link words like Endub, The Tribe, Hipgnosis, and so on is working.

Thanks to the phpGiggle team for saving me all the work it would have taken to make that happen.

Other Tribebloggers who want this feature should contact me and I’ll set them up. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be nice and easy but I’m waiting for Endub for get back to me as to whether his test run worked out or not…he’s at work, and has logged onto The Tribe, but he’s not on messenger so I can’t distract him and prevent him from working.

Anyway..if he says it works, I’ll just impliment it across everyones blogs I guess, since it should be plenty easy. I’ve got to go to a supervisors meeting at 10:30 am, so hopefully he’ll have got back to me by the time I’m done.

BTW - the blogs are being googled, just in case any of you were wondering. So, um..keep your anonymity in mind while posting I guess.

Started building the new server today. It should be awesome.

I’m unsure how I’m going to go about setting it up right now. I think I’ll probably do a clean install of “sarge” on the new box, and go through the hassle of properly moving the site to a whole new server with 2 x 100GB drives as the primary space, and a 200GB drive that will mount and back everything up at night. But that might be overkill. I also don’t trust new HD’s until they’ve proven themselves for a while, so it will be nice to have the old server sitting on stand by in case the new server shits the bed.
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The new server sounds like a helicopter.
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So I’m working on the new server…and the only mirror I can get to go fast reliably is debian.oregonstate.edu, how awesome is that?
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Install and configuration is going quite well. It’s currently 6:20pm and I’m moving /pub/ and /pub2/ over. I already have the news page and the messsage board running on the new server…and have to get tribemail and the blogs going and we should be all set.

Damn is the new machine ever sweet.
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Update -11:30pm:

The new server is looking sweet. Stability issues have been resolved. Everything is running on the new server in a testing environment with the exception of mail.

Hopefully I didn’t just fuck everything up by running ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’