We Can Rebuild It. We Have The Technology. Better… Stronger… Faster

Remember that gnarly footage of Steve Austin’s test plane crashing? The grainy, zoomed-in footage? The junk and pieces flying everywhere? That’s what our server was like. Slushpile was in pieces, strewn all over the data center floor.

Gratitude
First off, I need to extend a hearty thank-you to our kind patron saint of techie matters, John. The server went down on Tuesday afternoon. John hopped in his car and drove from the heart of Brooklyn all the way to the suburbs of northern Virginia. Arriving at the crash site at 10pm, John worked through the night until about 4:30am until he finally retreated to the Bates Motel, literally, for a couple of hours of sleep. He returned the carnage at 7:00am and worked until 3:30pm when he fought the always constipated Washington DC Beltway traffic, a torrential thunderstorm on I-95 and the usual NYC congestion to return home, exhausted. Wednesday night, Thursday, and most of Friday, John spent trying to get not just Slushpile, but all the other sites back up and running. He missed two days of work, spent money on gas, a new hard drive, and fees for a motel that doesn’t charge by the hour, and he went without untold hours of sleep.

I say all this because Slushpile is a labor of love, with no budget, no staff, and no money being made. We do this in addition to our fulltime jobs, just like most of you run your own sites after the working day is over. So you know what’s like. And John’s effort has gone above and beyond the call of duty. For that, I thank him.

What’s Next?
Some of our old stories and articles can be recovered from the incinerated ashes that were once our hard drive. Some of the other items, I’m going to try to re-create. Unfortunately, some posts will just be lost forever, but hopefully your nostalgia will burnish the memory of those posts and you’ll remember them as being better than they actually were.

Over the weekend, I’ll post the stuff that we can restore or recover. I’ll probably keep this message at the top for the next few days since it outlines our strategy of getting back off the ground. Since everything may now have the same date, be sure to use the categories on the left to navigate through the older material. My first action item is to try and get the interviews posted.

Please note that I’m going to get the text up first, so no photos for now. I’ll try to add those back in after I get the important stuff up.

More Gratitude
Finally, I’d like to say a word of thanks to all of you. Slushpile has grown in readers at an astounding rate and we’ve all be excited, encouraged, and humbled at the response. So thank you for your interest, thank you for your patience as we come back up, and thank you for reading in the future!

When I was a kid, I loved The Six Million Dollar Man. I never got into making the sound that everyone mimics, but I did, in fact, run in slow motion. I ran through the backyard and the fields of my farm, bounding up in the air in slow motion, just like Steve Austin. I wanted to make sure I was doing it right, like on the TV show, so I watched my shadow on the ground as I ran. A habit that stuck with me all the way through my years playing soccer in high school and college when my teammates always wanted to know what in the hell I was looking at. Luckily, by that point, I had outgrown the running in slow motion thing so I was able to get up and down the field at a decent pace. I promise you that we’ll try to get Slushpile back up as soon as possible, no slow motion affectations added.

Thanks,
Scott