this morning i was in a rush to get things done, and i realised that i hadn’t made this month’s backup of the web site, so i started that before i fed the critters or myself… and well before my weekly post was scheduled. i then realised something, and logged in to discover that it already was that way, but somehow, in the process, i’m fairly sure that i was logging in to exactly the same place that was being compressed for the backup, because it suddenly became REALLY slow and timed out a couple of times, and when i finally got the page to reload, it was blank… and it was about three minutes before it was scheduled to post…

i don’t know if anybody else was watching, but at 9:00 this morning, i posted a completely blank “another week closer to the eschaton” which then vanished after about five minutes (i made it private) and then, after i had taken care of a bunch of other, more physical things, about an hour later, i went back to yesterday’s saved version of the post (HOORAY for databases!) and restored that.

it feels really strange to say “hooray for databases” because i still only have a vague notion of what they are, despite the fact that my most recent “technical” employment involved installing and populating a wide variety of databases… it was kind of strange then, too, because i could tell you what the databases contained and how it related to the software i was testing, i still couldn’t really express, in words, what the database actually was… i get the impression that it’s sort of like a spreadsheet, but beyond that it gets really vague, really quickly… one way or the other, i was able to go into the database and restore today’s post.

that’s all. i’ll see you next week.