February 16, 2001

Well, I guess I ought to begin with a round of apologies for all the downtime on the 15th (and maybe into the 16th.) KeenSpot is undergoing some growing pains, and server upgrades have gone less than smoothly. I admire the dedication of our staff, working long hours for little (or no) pay in order to resolve the problems. With the same mouth I roundly curse the open-source movement for putting server configuration back in the hands of code-phreaking specialists, instead of making things easy on humans (which is what computers are for, lest we forget.)

I know I'll get some flames for this one, but it doesn't matter because the open-source sendmail daemon you'll be flaming me on is broken. When we tried to upgrade it, everything else broke. You can tout open-source solutions all you want, but I'll take a functional out-of-the-box solution any day. I don't have to know as much, and if it breaks I can get technical support.

Mind you, I'm not the one managing our servers. This is a good thing. I get to focus on creating Schlock Mercenary, and writing open letters full of irrationally sweeping generalizations that probably irritate the concatenated grep out of the rabidly loyal Torvaldniks. And in the same breath I can lambast the likes of Microsoft whose anticompetitive practices have turned words like "open standards" into epithetiotomiable streaks of choice vulgarity.

I can also make up words like epithetiotomiable, which means "able to have an epithetiotomy." Or words like "epethetiotomy" which means "the act of surgically removing one or more epithets from a vulgar phrase." Hah! Grep that, you phreaks.