Brick wall. Styal, Cheshire, United Kingdom.

Sunday  19th August 2009
Again I have to appologise for the lack of POTD entries for the last couple of weeks.  I think I have commented before that when I get behind (for whatever reason) I find it difficult to get back into the routine of posting.  Miss two days and late at night (when I post most of my POTDs) I tend to think… “it’s late I haven’t got time to do three entries to catch up…. I’ll do it tomorrow when I’ve got more time.”  Of course the next day I don’t get round to doing the post until late and now it is four days to do and it gets postponed.  By the time time 5 or 6 days go by it becomes: “oh well, another day won’t make any difference”.  But of course it does and before I know it I’m a couple of weeks behind.

I am still committed to my POTD and I have actually got images for every day between 7th April and now (19th April).  Over the next couple of day’s I’ll post the images to catch up and I will try my best not to get behind again.

So here is the first catch up entry, and the strange tale of how I came to be behind in the first place….

Tuesday 7th April 2009
Today for the first time in months and month I decided to spend sometime working on my websites.  In particular www.iphotos.co.uk and the photography forum there.  The site needed a complete rework, the forum software had broken nearly a year ago when the server had been upgraded by the hosting company.  So I spent the day downgrading the forum software to a stable state, upgrading it to the lastest software version, reconfiguring it, deleting spam from the associated wiki.  6hrs later I had a new site and I started the final task – to email the forum members to let them know of the relaunch.  But wait… the server is down, so is email, so are all my websites including the POTD.  Support call logged with hosting company.  Yes the server is dead.  Catestrophic disk failure.  (For the geeks: double disk failure in a raid 5 disk array).  Hosting company appologies and informs me they are restoring the server from the latest back up.  You guessed it the back up was from 8.00am this morning just before I started my server work.  This means that the 6 hours I spent working on my website has been totally lost.  Arraggghhh!   Not only that but the restore of the back up is taking forever…..

Anyone got a brick wall I can bang my head against?