Woo! I’ve just completed my 100th page for Distributed Proofreaders (see previous entry). 100 pages puts me in joint 236th position out of 3420 (I’m guessing quite a few people pick ‘100 pages’ as a good resting point). I’ve just been first-level proof reading “The Happy Adventurers” by Lydia Miller Middleton: ok, it’s a children’s book (about a time-travelling girl guide from the 30 pages of the first 60 I’ve read so far – unfortunately other people were working on the book at the same time so I didn’t get sequential pages). Oh, Sluggy Freelancer (a web comic strip about a freelance web designer, a deranged rabbit, a ferret, alien, ‘freelance bum’ and a few other things) is running a filler strip today. Drat. I was hoping the ‘Kitten II‘ strip would really get moving.
Richy's Random Ramblings
I feel just like keeping a quick record of how I’m editing in the ODP (mainly as I’m just trying to get a little distraction from the many many lines of PHP code that’s before my eyes). According to the current statistics, I’ve made 5,507 unique adds to the ODP, deleted 2,924 sites and moved 96 sites to unreviewed: making a total count of 11,108 modifications (spelling corrections, description changes, URL updates etc are included in that final number: that’s why it doesn’t add up correctly). Of course, sometimes moving a site counts as a delete+add, just moving sites from one unreviewed queue to another doesn’t count at all, and “spambusting” unreviewed queues aren’t recorded in my edit stats either (considering I’ve deleted over 500 spam submissions in one category before – it’ll be a big big number anyway 🙂 ). Over at Chefmoz, I’ve only made 43 modifications which have mainly consisted of 19 unique adds to the Leicester category. Oh, I’ve also got 255 posts over at Resource-Zone.
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).
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.
It seems that the DNS changes I put in place yesterday seem to have “taken” correctly. But unfortunately, my home PC seems to have cached the DNS records so I can’t check to the degree I want to. Remote checks seem to indicate all is well, but I wanted to do a DNS ‘dig’ from my home machine (as I can’t do it from anywhere else because I’ve only allowed a set group of IP address that sort of access to the server). Looks like I’ll have to wait until I’ve rebooted to find out (I was actually thinking of giving my machine a few hours downtime tonight so I can get some data off my old machine – I’ve only got the one monitor you see, plus I want to give my main machine a few hours ‘rest’: it’s normally on 24/7!).