It's a total non-issue for me, but Dreamhost (the cool company that's hosting my blog) is going through some rough times in their data centre at the moment. Apparently the heat wave in California is wreaking havoc on their power situation, causing a power outtage. The generators kicked in, but there was a short. And a fire. Hell broke loose. (the mention of the fire has disappeared from their Dreamhoststatus.com blog, so maybe it wasn't that bad...) So, my blog was down for awhile. Really no big deal. If you can read this, it's back up. I'm guessing there may be periodic outtages while it's sorted out.
David noticed and emailed me within minutes of the blackout - well before I would have. Actually, he seems to notice every outtage or hiccough on my server well before I do...
btw, Dreamhost is so unbelievably cool as a hosting company. I accidentally discovered that they have installed Appleshare services on my server (perhaps it's standard on all of their servers?) - I can have my hosted directory mounted on my desktop, and take advantage of Finder-y goodness rather than resorting to FTP or shell connections for everything. Nice. So, I have a 20GB (that's GigaBytes) volume, accessible anywhere, via FTP, AFP, or shell connections. They also offer WebDAV for directories (which I don't use), and Subversion, and one-click installs of every web app I could ever want. And the shell account is fully enabled, with access to emacs, cron, rsync, lynx, etc... not like the silly locked down accounts some providers offer (what? we had no idea you'd want to edit files. we have to enable emacs for you... mysql command line access? really? why would you want that? etc...)
I'm babbling. Dreamhost is an insanely cool hosting company. I'm extremely happy with the service they offer, and this minor downtime is trivial (and unavoidable, given the fragility of the North American power grid - does this scare the crap out of anyone else? A fuse can blow in southern Ontario, and drop the entire Eastern seaboard into darkness. Prime targets. yikes.)