I've felt bad all night and all day. Sick at my stomach and with no energy at all. I think I may have picked up a stomach bug besides the cold I got on the plane. I didn't sleep well last night and I've done nothing much but sleep today and yet I'm tired.

There were four or five blogs with some rather hot discussions going on. Lots of good and thoughtful and thought-provoking posts. Unfortunately, some people were being hurt, two authors have quit and another may quit. Some of the most hurtful comments were well-intentioned but perhaps too easily misunderstood.

Seems to have been changed, and I can't figure out where! So, it's all very... readable... right now, and causing breaks were there weren't any before.

EDIT: Disregard. Found it.

The statement has been made that BigCloset TopShelf's Quality has deteriorated. I am sincerely interested in this topic as keeping this site's quality above all the others like it on the net IS my concern.

Use the link in the header or this one: TopShelf-StarDust Chatrooms

Thanks, Bob. :)

Hugs,
Erin

With the Gabyzone ( http://www.gabyzone.com ) still being worked on with the java chat link to us being down still (Piper has enough problems in her life right now with Kim hospitalized) ,There are other ways to get in to chat with us.

The novel writing contest ended during that time my mom was in the hospital and I had no spare attention. Twice since then, I've sat down and constructed the polls needed for people to vote on the contest and twice Murphy ate my breakfast. It's been six months, the novel contest is over. Everybody that entered won. Sorry, I just don't have the steam; that locomotive left the station empty.

I don't get the blues, I get the grays. Life seems colorless and little annoyances seem sharply defined because of contrast. The few joys in this state feel faded and evanescent and cause for more sadness because each one is small and fleeting.

The server is acting oddly, I've had to reboot twice. Once last night and one just now. Service may be up and down for awhile. There's a lot of bogus traffic being logged, we may be under Denial of Service Attack. Or it may just be some goof on the network at the server farm has his Windows machine configured to broadcast everything he's doing over the local net. That's happened before.

Good thing I'm ambidextrous. :) Mousing with my left hand isn't hard but my desk isn't set up for it. I may not be doing much more today, it's not a bad burn so it should be okay tomorrow.

- Erin

At 2:05 pm PDT this afternoon, we hit 200 users at the same time. Because of a minor auto-update scheduled at that time, this caused a database "brownout". I took Apache and Mysql down and restarted them so some of you likely experienced a few mysterious messages while trying to load pages.

A friendly place to read, write and discuss fiction...

Database got corrupted during power flux at ISP. Spent almost 3 hours repairing it. Going to bed. Some data (node counters, history, logs) rolled back to previous week. Sorry about that.

- Erin

I bought a fence for my doggelle and put it up today. Now I'm in pain, hope to be feeling better after taking pain meds but need to flake out for a few hours at least.

The doggette had a good time in the yard though, she caught a three inch long grasshopper. :) It was almost worth kranging my back to watch her. She didn't know whether to attack or run and hide. :)

A spammer who left a list of links in a comment this morning has been banned from the server.

- Erin

Having some trouble getting things done, you may have noticed.

It's not just stuff on the site. I need time to recover which I will, I'm pretty resilient about stuff like this but just bear with me while I work through it.

Hugs to all,
Erin

Piper has Crystal's Storysite and, I assume, the other sites associated, working on the new connection. Nice and quick. :)

Hugs,
Erin

Feb 28th is the second anniversary of Bob Arnold's Stardust site. There are stories that are posted there first or only, so take a look. :)

We are all made of Stardust!

Hugs,
Erin

I don't watch football usually, but I would watch it more often if games were as good as the fourth quarter of this Superbowl. Two excellent teams, two fantastic quarterbacks, head to head competition between the minds of two great coaches. Wow!

The Pats didn't let themselves be outplayed, they just got out-lucked by a Giants team that made no important mistakes. Double wow!

- Erin

Bob and I are planning on a chat session for Sunday, Feb. 10 at 1 p.m. EST.

Still no idea what happened yet, the server was down for over 12 hours but the ISP said only "server up" and closed the trouble ticket. I'm annoyed.

But glad to be back!

Hugs,
Erin

Unfortunately, the hit counts missed in the last day or so are just gone, they didn't get recorded.

Bob and I figured out how to fix it but the time machine is broken. Sorry about that.

Hugs all,
Erin