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Day: 9 November 2002

Books: Distributed Proofreaders

I came across Distributed Proofreaders via an article on Slashdot (although the article has now been replicated on Kuro5hin). Basically, it’s a group of volunteers (a bit like ODP) that “proof-read” books for Project Gutenberg (a site where you can download ‘out-of-copyright’ books). I’ve only been a member now for just over 24 hours, but I’m really enjoying it – and I’ve proof read 50 pages so far (rank 347 out of 3349).

Techy: Server downtime

Yesterday (8th November), my main server in London went ‘down’ around 6.30am. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice until around 5.30pm (on a Friday night!) and instantly sent my hosting provider an email via their web-feedback form to ask them to re-boot my server to try and bring it back online. I send them a proper email at 6.38pm as well (just in case). I can’t sleep so at 9am, I try calling them on the telephone. No response. At 10am, I send an email CC’ing to their sales address (and, this time, get an automatic acknowledgement). Around midday, I get a very apologetic phone call saying that they had moved all their dedicated servers to another part of their hosting facility, but somehow mine had got lost behind.