today i woke up, took a shit, did this and that, then atempted to log in to the web server that runs, among other things, this web site. no joy. nothing. pings returned nothing. all was fail. it felt like a repeat of the november blowout and, you know, it very well could have been. in fact, it *was* the same problem. a disk failure. unfixable. hard disks are built to fail.

this time, though, i was prepared. at worst i might have been offline for 24 hours, but with 2 RAIDs to back me up things were back in order within about 4 hours from when i discovered the problem. most of the work went on at the data center, where the local RAID is basically what saved the day. but had that RAID failed then my RAID at home would have been ready to roll. restoring the live web sites from that RAID would have been far more time-consuming than restoring it from the local RAID at the data center, but it would have worked just as well. i have maximum redundancy, it seems. the downtime cost me some money, and some aggravation, but compared to last year’s blowout this was a cakewalk. just a cost-of-doing-business inconvenience for a sole proprietor.

i got lucky again, though. my planning can’t be *that* good, but this went well enough to prove to me that i seem to know what i’m doing. with more resources and time i’d have avoided the hours of downtime today but there, again, i got lucky with it being a low-traffic saturday, and a holiday weekend at that…

which is not to suggest that i am not extremely crabby and irritable today. i am intricately prickly this day, but i’ll sleep it off.

i feel like i got not sleep last night. i had the brilliant idea to eat a bacon cheeseburger at about 1am, an old acid-reflux-inducing habit i broke out of some years ago, but which i think is to blame for my ongoing need for Omeprazole every single fucking day. i felt like little lightning bolts were crackling in my innards all through the night. so dealing with this near-blowout was a bit like sitting on a sponge of thumbtacks.

…..

someone wrote to ask if i knew anything about a French restaurant called Le Berru, which used to be at 321 west 51st Street. i know nothing of it but that i have a scan of a matchbook cover from that restaurant. i have a scan of the matchbook on my web site because it has an old-style telephone exchange name on it. but i also scanned and shared those matchbook with the idea that i might help raise from oblivion the memory of a restaurant or establishment that vanished from the local memory. ephemeral information is cool that way. and it seems to have worked today, at least where my pithy matchbook collection is concerned. someone found the matchbook page and said she had been researching the place for years but found no evidence to say that the place existed anywhere but in her memory. she said she had dinner there with gary cooper and don ameche, but ovr the years she came to question whether the place even existed. score! and to think that that precious content was unavailable to the public Internet for half of this day