Weird Little Woodwork

In which our Hero finds his hands reaching for tools and his brain itching for a clue

I wasn’t going to comment on the OD outage but I’ve been asked, so here’s my short bit of coverage.

1) The facebook page was updated by EWS saying he’d texted the DM who was looking into it.

2) THe facebook page was updated by EWS about a day later indicating that the issue was resolving in a few hours.

3) The twitter page was not updated at all.

My response: Communications could have been better, but really, within a few hours, we got a “working on it” and then an update within a day. That’s in the range of “pretty reasonable.” Kudos to EWS for posting the updates, I think it’s a brave thing standing in the path of the collective “grr.”

What I would improve? Post to twitter (not everybody uses Facebook (me!) and twitter has less clutter around the actual message)

And I’d ask the DiaryMaster to update directly. It would have added no more actual information than EWS’s post, but it would have made people feel better. The angels notwithstanding, we like our gods to be present.

I score it at a 7 out of 10. No data lost, communications happened, fix happened. Can’t really complain.

I am not affiliated with the lifeboat project. Mainly, as I recall, because they use facebook and I do not. I don’t really remember the reason. Might have been because the mailing list form asks for a real name (even optionally, no thanks).

I don’t really remember why. That’s funny. But no, I ain’t thems.

Someone did prod me about working on a successor. I got energized for a few minutes and then hit the same wall I always hit. What I have is technical proficiency. What I don’t have is the social graph. And a bunch of private paranoid types are not going to pull the kind of community required to make the project really hit successful.

It’s given me a hilarious idea though. I mean, it’s a good idea but it also makes me laugh. I dunno. I have to think about it. Part of me really wants to take a shot just for the technical exercise. Part of me wants to take a shot for the stability of a platform I trust.

Part of me just wants to play with new toys.

But then…

Out of the blue, I get two inquiries for potential paid business. And sorry me loves, but before I work on a freebie project for a site I’m just not usening so religiously as I was (don’t worry non-anglos, usening is *not* the dictionary form of the word, I just liked how it sounded).

Project one is a physical product. I like it because I see the application, and I see the solution, it’s just a matter of glomming together the disparate parts. I don’t like it because even the retail parts are expensive, and I don’t think the wholesale costs would come down enough to make it viable, at least not the way the inventor pitched it to me. Can’t say more, NDA-hat is on, cheerio, pip-pip.

Project two is a software one, out of the blue, and comes with an offer to meet-the-toddler, which is frankly more than enough excuse for me to get involved. He’s an old client, and I guess he’s back in business after the new kid. And frankly I need something new so I’m more than likely to take on the irritation even if it means, as I suspect it will, that I have to work on a Microsoft tool chain.

So we’ll call alterna-diary project three and then there’s project four.

All in all, it’s getting interesting, and I like the way the challenges taste.