Funk Babblings

So, all those people who backed up their livejournals when they heard about the sale to Six Apart may have had the right idea after all, even if it was for the wrong reason.

Slashdot had some comments on the LJ outage, including some Informative comments from LJ admins bradfitz and denisep/rahaeli. My favorite comment there (among many funny ones):

A great disturbance in the Force... (Score:5, Funny)
... as if millions of teenage girls suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I'm on the MadCow cluster, so I had to wait until this afternoon to exist again on LJ, while most people came back last night. I survived by anonymously sucking on my friends' friends lists, and luckily didn't need to gnaw my own keyboard off. (OK, actually we had a great visit with a friend last night.)

Around the time that LJ went down Friday, I got a brief firsthand look at some real-life downtime. After work I headed down to Bolivar (a little town just inside Tuscarawas county, the next county south of us), to deposit my paycheck. That's the nearest location of my bank since I never switched banks after moving out of Columbus.

When I got off the freeway, I noticed police cars, a couple big TV trucks, and lots of activity under the freeway bridge -- and the road I was going to closed to traffic going east under the bridge, toward Zoar. Which was OK for the moment since Bolivar is on the west side of the freeway, but the closing blocked my path back onto the freeway going north.

I got to the bank minutes after it closed, went to the ATM to get some cash (and kicked myself for not bringing any deposit slips), called nontacitare to let her know where I was and that it might take a while to find my way home, and to tell her to turn on the TV to find out what was going on where I was. She told me she didn't have to turn on the TV to know about the major flooding in Tusc county, since it had been in the paper and we knew people in the area affected by it. OK, so I'm oblivious sometimes. (And I hadn't yet seen that day's paper.)

So I got onto the freeway heading south (away from home), and as I went up the ramp I could see that the road under the bridge was entirely underwater. I drove ten miles south to the Dover exit before I could get turned around to go the right direction. As I approached the Bolivar/Zoar exit again, I could see that everything east of the freeway in that area was underwater! It was incredible. There were tall trees sticking out, and in the distance I could see businesses with their bright lights on... and reflecting in the water around them.

Then I got home and discovered that while I had my bank card and a receipt showing I'd taken money out, I didn't have that money. I seriously considered going back to look for it, but decided to stay away. I'll just consider it a charge having seen the flooding.