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We South Dakotans tend to talk about how friendly and helpful we all are. While it sometimes may just be lip service, I learned again this week that it’s true and, moreover, that it carries over to our blogosphere.
When the lights went out here for an extended period of time, PP at South Dakota War College and Todd at S.D. Watch graciously let people know why things were dark. As the clock kept ticking, Todd even generously offered S.D. Watch as a place for me to post. Within the hour, my web host and blog were back up. As I told Todd, evidently the gods of the blogosphere feared another commie heathen posting at his site.
In addition, Commander Other from The Otherwhirled not only gave me some advice on a new web host, he actually offered to reinstall my site on the new server. It’s an offer I may still take him up on if it appears it will prevent me inflicting serious physical damage on my laptop and/or desktop PC.
Here’s the thing. While I’ve known Todd for years, I’ve never met PP or Commander Other face to face. This is despite the fact I co-blogged with PP on Amendment E and have traded e-mails with Commander Other for a long time. To them, the only thing that mattered this week was that a fellow SD blogger had the proverbial “technical difficulties.” As South Dakotans will do, they stepped up to help.
I’d call it Christmas spirit but I know they would have done the same were it mid-January or the dog days of summer. They all deserve this public thanks.
Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man’s cruelty and baseness.
Bryant McGill, A Gift Giver’s Manifesto
After a 72+ hour outage here, the blog is back — I hope.
Many thanks to the South Dakota War College and S.D. Watch for letting people know this wasn’t a voluntary shut down. (A bit more on them in another forthcoming post.) The problem was that the servers used by my web host apparently crashed entirely and the web host evidetnly could not cope in trying to get them restored.
I probably should have had some concern about two weeks ago when a few days of posts simply disappeared. The entire experience has led to a couple things already.
While I had a back-up of my blog database, I didn’t have a backup of anything that isn’t in the database. Since that covers a lot of ground, the first thing I did when the servers were back up was copy everything to my local hard drive.
Second, when servers being down also means you can’t contact technical support, it’s time to look for a new web host. I have a new one signed up but dread the thought of trying to migrate everything to a new server. That likely will be my project over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays.
What did you miss while things were down? Well, there’s a couple posts from last weekend you might not have seen. I also didn’t post items on Dan Fogelberg’s death and the story in the Argus about state government’s legal bills. Both seem a tad dated now so I likely will forgo them entirely. I will also have a marginalia post on things from elsewhere in cyberspace you might have missed
Hopefully, the lights here will stay on for a while and at least until I have things all ready to go on the new web host.
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
Leslie Lamport, May 28, 1987
It started this year and I’ve commented on it a few times. For whatever reason, I’ve become more and more intrigued with fictional works by non-U.S. authors. I realized the extent to which I’ve indulged in and enjoyed that fixation preparing the ballot I submitted during the weekend for this year’s NBCC Book Awards.
Of my five fiction votes, three went to works not originally written in English. While the other two come from English-speaking authors, there’s also a touch of the international in them.
Two of the three translated works were reviewed here together: Antonia Arslan’s Skylark Farm and Christian Jungersen’s The Exception. The third was the inimitable Literature from the “Axis of Evil” compilation from Words Without Borders. All three not only kept me immersed while reading them, they’ve stuck with me in one sense or another since then. It’s also only fair to note that the same is true for a work that just missed my fiction vote list: The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent, a collection of translated stories edited by James and Kathryn Morrow. It may rank as the best SF I read this year.
As noted, the English language works on my ballot also have an international flavor. One was British author Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, set on the British coast in 1962. The other was Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land. Although born in Lebanon, Halaby grew up mostly in Arizona, givng her the perspective necessary for a story detailing how the lives of a couple born and raised in Jordan fall apart while working and residing in Tucson.
Perhaps this new interest skewed my views. Undoubtedly, part of the reason most of these stuck with me is that in addition to being well-written, they provide new and different perspectives. For me, that’s one of the things good books do — expose you to ideas, lives and places you may never encounter firsthand.
Will any of these receive the NBCC fiction award? Probably not. But whether they do is irrelevant to their worth in my reading life.
Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Jessamyn West, To See the Dream
Today is Arthur C. Clarke’s 90th birthday. I make note of this because Clarke is significantly responsible for my longstanding interest in quality science fiction.
I’d had a casual interest in SF before going to college. One semester, though, I took a SF class in the English department. By the time the year was out, I’d read five of his books — Childhood’s End and the Hugo Award-winning Rendezvous with Rama among them — and not all were required reading for the course. Clarke was as much responsible as the course in addicting me. I still have about 20 of his works in my home library plus an audio version of his collected stories.
Clarke’s ideas went beyond SF so it’s probably not totally fair to remember him just for his contributions in that field. Still, his contributions and thought in that area were occasionally prescient. Besides, what impacts your life the most is what will always stand out when you think of an author. So, a happy 90th and thanks to Sir Arthur.
[I]t’s only by not taking the human race seriously that I retain what fragments of my considerable mental powers I still possess!
Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End
The last couple days convinced me it was karma that my middle daughter ended up going to college in Nebraska. For reasons detailed below, it looked liked there might a temporary blackout here in today’s on sale for Springsteen’s March 14 appearance in Omaha. Figuring a town in Nebraska wouldn’t be subject to the blackout, I contacted my daughter. While she wasn’t going to be in the town where she goes to college (which doesn’t have a Ticketmaster outlet any way), she was spending the weekend with a college friend from Lincoln, which has multiple Ticketmaster outlets. Thus, the two girls were standing in line for me this morning and got the two reserved seat tickets I requested.
To be safe, I ducked out of a meeting to see if there was a delay in online sales here. Turns out there wasn’t and I got two reserved seat tickets myself. One of the two pair will likely go to a friend at work who may not have gotten tickets. Ultimate result is that the wife and I will Springsteen and the E Street Band in Omaha March 14 and then in St. Paul two nights later.
The blackout concern arose when the same friend at work noticed Thursday that the page for ticket sales said: “Sales to this event have been restricted to the regional selling area during the first 15 minutes of the on sale.” I have no problem with this and, in fact, it was something I’ve said in the past might work to keep at least some tickets out of the hands of brokers. The problem is the page didn’t indicate what constituted the regional selling area.
I sent an e-mail via Ticketmaster’s “Contact Us” section that simply asked what made up the regional selling area for the concert. Two hours later I got a canned, five-paragraph reply that basically said there may be a lot of demand for tickets for certain concerts so sometimes “ticket sales are limited to fans who live within a certain radius of their local venue.” Of course, the response didn’t say what that radius was for this concert.
I sent a reply pointing out to customer service (quite the misnomer) that the response was nonresponsive. Six hours later, but still on Thursday, I got a reply that said, “We do regret any inconvenience you may have experienced in connection with your recent ticket purchase” and that it was going to contact the promoter for clarification and would be back to me shortly. Now, more than 48 hours after receiving that e-mail and more than 12 hours after tickets went on sale, I’m still waiting for that information.
And while this may not be Ticketmaster itself, the person handling ticket sales at the location my daughter went to wasn’t a prize either. Among other things, she said there were no reserved seats for the concert and no “lower level” seating — the two things I told my daughter I wanted. There is/was reserved seating and I said “lower level” based on experience with other venues. Turns out the nomenclature at Qwest Center is “lower bowl.” Had we not talked on the phone while she was waiting in line, who knows what kind of tickets my daughter would have got.
No wonder there’s so many problems with ticket sales to popular concerts. Economic forces have left the process in the hands of an unwieldy, unresponsive and ignorant corporate structure. While that will be nothing but a distant memory for me come mid-March, you wonder how many real people lose out to ticket brokers because of the process.
Trust none of what you hear
And less of what you see
“Magic,” Bruce Springsteen, Magic
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Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
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