Lots of news today, both good and bad! I’ll get the bad stuff out of the way first.
Last night, P’s hard drive decided to fail. He was doing a virus scan and for no reason the drive just started click like crazy. We took it out, tried it in mine, shook it, yelled at it and finally accepted the fact that it was dead. And all at the tender age of four months.
Naturally, we were pissed. You don’t expect a known-brand (Maxtor) hard-drive to just fail after four months of ordinary use. And when I say fail, I don’t mean the electrics went or something really sensitive like that, it was actual mechanical failure. The clicking noise was the sound of the head whacking the spindle!
Of course, it was under guarantee, but what really upset us was that P had an awful lot of work on that drive. Of particular importance where all the raw Flash files for his websites. If you’re not familiar with Flash, then I’ll just tell you that, when you make a website, you don’t upload the raw files onto the web – instead you create .swf files from them which cannot be edited. This means that P has lost his Clowns Are Evil site (he can’t add new members) and his dancing Bessie animation. Fortunately, we recovered most of the Depressed Cow files from a backup we’d made just after Christmas.
So that’s the bad news. Now on to the happy stuff.
I got an email from my host this morning detailing some upgrades to customer’s accounts. One of the new features they have added is – wait for it – sub-domains with individual FTP! I’m soooo happy! I can finally host people! I’ve had so many requests from potential hostees and had to turn them all down, but now I can say yes.
I know what you’re thinking. Oooh, how exciting – not. Well perhaps it isn’t for you, but it certainly is for me! So, I’ll be adding more info over the next few days and keeping an eye out for wannabe hostees. 😉