Maybe I should’ve just taken Easter off, and left the site alone. Alas, the fact that I hadn’t written anything in a while left me with a bit of guilt, and so I put together this nice, invective-laden piece about Sony turning into a too-big-for-its-britches ghetto brand. You might’ve seen it, for the few hours it was actually up on this site. Coincidentally, I spent two days writing the piece, and I failed to notice that it was article #666 in the scaredpoet.com article database. Oh, what a bad, bad omen that was.
Sadly, the article is no more. Because shortly after I wrote the article, I sat back to vainly admire the literary fruits of my labor. And then I noticed a curious bug in the site’s code.
So, I went to fix it. A simple software update should do! Right? No, alas, the software update not only failed to solve the issue, but caused another annoying problem. So I tried another fix. Another bug is created!
Well, now I’m annoyed. So I decide the one way to fix all of this, once and for all, is go directly into the site database and manually edit it.
MISTAKE.
In a single mouse-click, I managed to push the wrong “x.” And I managed not to delete just the teensy-tiny little piece of the system that was causing me so much trouble, but the WHOLE GODDAMN DATABASE.
And with that sickening “click” of my Mighty Mouse, kind friends, three and a half years of rantings were obliterated in a mere 400 microseconds of CPU time. Needless to say, I felt quite sick seeing the end result displayed proudly and dutifully by my web server (after all, it has expediently done exactly what I told it to).
After FREAKING OUT for a few minutes, I remembered that fortunately for my sanity (and for rabid Tripp Eisen fans everywhere), I had a full backup of the database from last Thursday. Also luckily, the article I was working on for later in the week was still in a browser window, ready to be cut-and-paste back into its rightful location. So, not all was lost. But, the Evil Sony Article remains MIA, as being mere hours old, there was no surviving copy. I may re-write it, but it probably won’t be as good.
End result: the site was down for about 30 minutes while I A. Panicked, screamed and bashed my head into a wall, and B. breathed into a paper bag while I waited for my last backup to decrypt and mount… and, also for the stars in my field of vision to clear enough for me to see the screen.
Fuck, what a Sunday. But, I think I nailed that bug! 😀
interestingly, THIS article is now post #666. We’ll see how long this lasts, until the next calamity occurs.
In other news: there may be a 2-hour-or-so downtime in about 32 days, when the new version of ubuntu goes live. Of course that means I’ll be upgrading this puppy to that new OS as soon as it hits. While it is a bit quirky, ubuntu is a nice linux distro that is very well-supported by a dedicated team of volunteers. If you’re thinking about tinkering with linux, or even want to host a website or run a web server, I highly recommend it. It’s permitted this site to see stability unseen back in the bad old days when it was hosted on a windows server.
UPDATE: Good news! Buried among my mess of open windows was a slightly older draft of The Sony Rant. So you might see it back soon!
