International Women's Day

Today is International Women’s Day. In recognition of this day, there has been a call for a general woman’s strike. I thought long and hard about how I would participate in this event. Even yesterday I had no clear view of whether or not I would be working today.
As a self-employed woman, me not working today only hurts me and my clients. There’s no one to leave work for, I either do it before or after. It’s got to get done and it’s my responsibility to do it. But at the same time, I recognize the unpaid and underpaid work most women do and fully support the strike.
After much thought, I decided that my contribution to the strike would be to do what I needed to do for work. But that I would remove myself from public conversations about email today. I spend quite a bit of my time doing unpaid work that supports the email industry: standards work, answering questions in various fora, supporting different initiatives, writing documents, blogging about industry events. I won’t be doing any of that work today.
Yes, there are questions I could answer, advice I could give, industry events that I have comments and insight on. But today, today I’m not going to do any of that.

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Back from Vegas

Had a wonderful time at the Email Innovations conference last week. Got a chance to see some familiar faces and meet a lot of new ones.
There is so much new and interesting and exciting stuff going on in the world of email. I think we’re hitting another period for real growth and innovation that’s going to change what we see in our inboxes and how we use email.
 

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Network glitches and corrupted VMs

I had a bit of a interesting Friday. I was so glad it was finally the weekend. Saturday we did a bunch of errands, including go visit our servers. See, we’ve been upgrading infrastructure to implement a second type of backup system. Saturday we were doing the last set of upgrades so we could install over the weekend.
Yes, we do all our own networking and racking.
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Saturday evening Steve is installing the new backup software. This is awesome backup software. It backs up the entire virtual machine. If we lose a virtual machine, we can just reload the entire thing and it will be back again.
Except while installing the software, there is a weird network glitch. Said network glitch caused the system to crash. The system crashes hard. The system crash corrupts some of the data on disk. The data on disk is our virtual machine files. Files are in read only mode and won’t fsck automatically.
We lose most of our production virtual machines.  We’re off the air.
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Possibly this was tragic, not ironic. I dunno, it’s been a long weekend.
We lost a bunch of production virtual machines to the disc corruption. We haven’t lost any data, but it’s taking some time to rebuild the machines and pull data from the other backup system and get it installed.
That means some of our websites and services, like tools.wordtothewise.com are down. It may mean you saw some bounces if you sent us mail over the weekend. Mail is back and we are communicating with the outside world again.
Steve’s working through our other services as fast as possible to get them back up and running.
(If massive server issues weren’t enough, one of the cats got a UTI so we’re having to pill her twice a day. Then last night managed to puke so hard she passed out briefly. Poor thing. She’s doing better this morning.)

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Why care about email?

I got my first email address in the very late 80s. I was an intern at a government agency. I learned a lot there: how to sequence DNA, how to handle radioactive material, how to handle human pathogens, and how to send email. I got my first non-work non-school address in the mid-90s. One of the first things I did was join some mailing lists.
One of them was a list for folks who had pet rabbits. I met a lot of people there, both online and in person. As with many people we meet through a shared interest as our interest wanes the relationships change. Some relationships were maintained, but some of us lost touch with one another. Moves, job changes, email address changes, they all affect our ability to maintain relationships online. I kept in touch with some, one was the maid of honor at my wedding and a few years ago I was the maid of honor at hers. I lost track of others.
 

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