If you are reading this then WITFITS is fixed. I logged in today to check on things and was greeted with nothing but a blue screen. Wonderful. I was about to shoot off (another) nasty letter to Blogger when I decided to check out my template. Sure enough, it was mostly missing. It had most of the CSS stuff in it, but nothing else. Fantastic. I could have spit fire.

Fortunately, I had a copy of the template in my recycle bin from about a week back or so when I was playing with it. I plopped that down and the site is back up. Sorry to those who may have tried to access it in the meantime. Just goes to show you, if you mess with the site a lot like I do, always have a backup. I've been burned by this type of thing too many times before, I should have been smart enough to start keeping regular backups. I will now. I'll be a good computer user and back up my data, honest.

So let's backtrack some 12-20 hours to yesterday. Some of you may have gotten to read my post where I was bitching about the weather. Well, along with it being cold and utterly unbearable outside (it snowed/sleeted all day, I'm glad I didn't go anywhere, the visibility was nil), it also was playing havoc with the electricity. I experienced brownouts all day, from about 4pm to probably midnight. The power grid was definitely not happy--I think it flickered off and then back on about seven or eight times, about once per hour. Although I didn't lose any of the work on the computer, it did force me to keep turning my cable box on, and royally hosed my TiVo recordings for the day.

A few hours after posting my rant about Mother Nature and what she can do with my dangly parts, I realized that, hey, what do you know, I have a digital camera. I bought it a couple of years ago when I took a trip and I still forget that it is right here at my fingertips for whatever need arises. And, since it's digital, I can take as many crappy and worthless pictures as I want without paying for or wasting film. So, I figured that as a good little blogger, I should at least go out and snap some shots for you fine people out there in WITFITS land.

I took a few pictures and sat down to try and upload them to the site. I started up Hello and set it up to upload my three pictures (a total of 300KB max). It sat there. And sat there. And sat there. Finally, it told me it couldn't upload. Great. I tried again. And waited. And tried again. And waited. Finally after about an hour I got disgusted and, assuming it was either a Blogger or Hello problem, I went out to find some free image hosting services on the web. I settled on PhotoBucket if for no other reason than to try it out, and set out on the (apparently mammoth) task of uploading my pictures again. Even PhotoBucket choked on this paltry sum of bits I attempted to feed it. This wasted at least another hour of my time and elevated my frustration level to new heights. But I was noticing all sorts of other problems with the Web, so I started to get suspicious.

I did a little investigating and found out that all was not well in Internet land. <geekspeak>I pinged out to a couple of domains and was getting anywhere from 10% to 75% packet loss at times, though when I pinged my router the connection was fine.</geekspeak> I wasn't having any problems downloading, so I went and did some tests. My download speed came out okay, as I figured, but I wasn't getting anywhere with the upload tests (most of the sites I went to told me they couldn't run the test for some reason). After fiddling with this for a good hour or more, and performing some other maintenance like updating my antivirus, running full virus and spyware scans of my machine, and doing a few reboots of the system and my router, I finally managed to get an upload test to work. <geekspeak>The test I ran returned a rate of 13Kb/s. That's 13 kilobits per second. Dial up is 40!</geekspeak> So, suffice it to say, the storm (assumedly) had also severely fuxx0red my service provider's network.

Anyway, during all this I was also making changes to the WITFITS template and apparently it didn't upload all of it when I saved it. So, there you have it, Mother Nature was indirectly responsible for you guys missing out on 12-16 hours of, well, whatever it is you come here for (I'm betting it's the free donuts).

One last note: remember how I said that Spring in Ohio is really unusual? Well, I took a couple more pictures today to show proof of it. It has been in the 50's all day (and windy as all get out), and a good portion of the snow has melted away. Check it out:

Last Night (April 3, 2005 ~12:30am)
Wide shot showing the parking lot and garages.
Closer shot to show the snow on the ground and sidewalk.
Looking down the sidewalk at a row of snow covered cars.

Today (April 3, 2005 ~5:30pm)
Wide shot of the parking lot and garages.
Looking down the sidewalk at a row of clean cars.

And with that, I bid you adieu. I'm off to spend the rest of the day fixing the site and re-implementing all the changes I made in the last week.

I'll get you Mother Nature.
Next time.
Next time....

Tags: Computers and Internet, Geek, Life, Ramblings, Weather