Posted on September 14, 2003

• I’m happy to announce that the Digital Blasphemy 2004 Wall Calendars are now available for sale. Last year I created one calender for sale, but this year I am offering five different themes. You can choose from Classic, Nature, Space, Structure, or Abstract images. Hope you like them!

9/13:/03:

• In case you missed it, the members gallery disappeared from the web last Sunday. The hard drive it was stored on failed (a blown out IC) and refused to be read.

  The gallery had been humming along nicely on the same 300 MHz Pentium (with a doomed 3 GB HD) ever since 1999. I’d been asked repeatedly by the folks at Rackspace if I wanted to upgrade my system, but I always thought “if it ain’t broke, why fix it”.

  Last Sunday it broke, so I decided to fix it. I’ve moved the members (and secure) server to the relatively fast AMD 1.3 GHz with 256 MB of RAM. It’s faster than most of the machines I’ve used to render my graphics and it should hold us for a few years more. I’ve also started doing weekly tape backups (which I had thought were happening all along) so the next time my HD goes south we should be back up in a matter of hours.

  As you can see, most of the gallery is back online. I am still working to upload the PNG collection and the ZIPs. There’ s over 900 MB of files to upload, and my DSL seems to have a capped upload speed of around 15K per second. It will probably take the rest of the day, during which time you will see some error messages on the gallery pages. Sorry about that.

  Whether you tried to log in during the outage or not, I apologize for the fact that it happened. I’ve gone ahead and added 14 days to everyone’s memberships to cover both the week I was down, and a weeks break that I am going to be taking starting tomorrow.

  I want to say a big thanks to everyone who wrote me such supportive emails during the outage, and especially those who made note of my 32nd birthday on Thursday. I had a wonderful day (celebrated with a nice Tandoori dinner that evening) surrounded by friends and family. What more could anyone ask for?