Weather in the Denver area interrupted power and connectivity to the server farm. They worked on the problem for quite a while then it took even longer to get all the servers rebooted. Looks like we are back online. :)

Hugs,
Erin

I had one of those tedious dreams last night.

Contributions to the Hatbox continue to be what keeps Piper and I able to keep this website and a dozen others used by the TG community active and running.

Angela Rasch's "Voices Carry Over Water" is now available to contributors to the Hatbox and we will soon have the revised version of "To Alleviate Suffering" there, too. Thanks very much, Angela. :)

http://i.imgur.com/1jf2plE.jpg

:)

Hugs,
Erin

Much too hard to do this on the phone, see you all in the morning.

Hugs,
Erin

We just payed our $1572 hosting bill and will have another smaller one next month (or maybe it is in November). Anyway, these things go on my credit cards and then I pay down the balance with the money that comes in from the Hatbox gifts. We made our goal for August over the weekend and now need to think about September.

Anything you can send will be good and if you can't do anymore than hit the kudos button on your favorite story, we all understand.

It's the middle of August and we still aren't halfway to our goal for July. There've been a lot of unexpected medical expenses and while the hardware fund has collected some money, that last $500 was from me.

I want everyone to know how much we appreciate your gifts, we couldn't do this without help. Piper's work on the servers has made BC stable and reasonably fast. If you appreciate that work and can afford to, a few dollars would be a great help.

Thanks and hugs,
Erin

Disrespecting anyone's profession of belief in a comment, blog or forum post is not allowed on BC. Please don't attempt to embarrass someone with public comments here. But is this a friendly place for atheists? I try to make it so.

You can announce your beliefs without dissing other people's in public. I remove comments and blogs where someone calls out their version of religion as being the only true one. You can announce what you believe or don't believe but no proselytizing. And trying to ridicule other people's beliefs is definitely against Rule One.

This is a new extension to the friendly rule; titles and teasers that appear on the front page should be work safe and if there are non-work friendly images past the teaser, that should have a caution attached.

This means some of my own teasers would not have passed this test but I think we need to add this caveat. It applies to stories, blogs, links, and even comment subject lines. I will take what steps I think necessary to implement this, usually just modifying the teaser, tags or title slightly.

Hugs,
Erin

This is about my 20th time, I attended the third one way back in 72 and I've gone to almost half of them since then. I have a few friends in the industry and know even more people just to say hi to. I always get enthused about my comics work when I'm here. :)

Having been a small publisher back in the first days of indie comics (we called them street-level comics), I get a professional badge and get to hang out with the pros and drink free coffee in the pro lounge. So cool!

We got in a big check for the server fund in June but other donations for the Hatbox are very behind. The way this is going to work is that when we make the goal for the month, I will donate $500 to the server fund from the Hatbox. Also, donations that come in marked for Server Fund will go there.

So, anything you can chip in will be good. We will probably be using the server fund around October/November to upgrade at least one of the servers to a 3 to 5 year life machine. The other machines may have to wait till next year.

Thanks to everyone.

Hugs,
Erin

Not to put too fine a point on it but there's less than four days to go in the month and we are still short about $700 of our goal. (There's known money in the mail.)

If you tweet or follow twitter, you can find BC news at the @spfn Twitter feed run by Piper. Besides tweeting links to posts and blogs on StoryPortal, it also tweets story posts from BC, automagically several times a day.

Hugs,
Erin

We may have some files that have been corrupted, perhaps during the crashes on Magda.

We hope you have noticed that things are slowly getting better as we tune the server for better performance but sometimes we blow a sour note like this morning. And the server is still a bit flakey which we are still working on figuring that out.

But we have ordered the new drives, they should be in tomorrow and so it's likely that later this week the site will be down for as much as a whole day while we install the new drives and then move the software over. And then there will be another round of tuning things to get optimum performance.