Head bonks

Not a good morning. Not ‘tall.

I go in this morning, after a late, rather stressful evening before, pull up my web page, and …

Blank. Nada. Zilch. No content.

Whiteness loads when you visit.
The web page is zero length.
Winter snow has come.

Quick seach via FTP shows the index, and some of the recent post files, are size=0. Huh?

I try to copy a file up there. Disk quota exceeded. Wha–?

I check my e-mail. Nothing comes through. Okay, now I’m suspicious.

Back in August, I had a similar problem when I was moved at Hosting Matters from the Kronos to the Calliope server. Calliope had an error, reporting back false disk space utilization, and the very helpful HM techies bumped up my quota to double what I was paying for in order to diagnose the problem.

Well, I’ve kept an eye on things, and I’ve had a reasonable margin of free space since then. I quickly dialed up, hit the control panel — and I showed at 6 Mb over my limit. Damn.

Hit the HM support page, reopen the old ticket.

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

HM has been so good about getting back to me within an hour that when it doesn’t happen, the wait feels interminable. So finally, around 11, I opened a new ticket, thinking that their system might be not highlighting the one I’d opened.

So, of course, a few seconds later, as soon as I go back and check the old ticket again, there’s been an answer to it.

HM upgraded their system software in various ways last night, on my server, and one of the results was that a bunch of files that hadn’t been included in the disk quota previously, now suddenly were. Eep!

So I’ve upgraded my hosting plan (again), and thing are beginning to flow smoothly. (The HM techie who addressed my problem actually bumped up my quota slightly so that mail would stop being interrupted, bless her, and the sales folks got my quota increased in the new plan from the time I left work to the time I got home.)

I’d wrote a bunch of stuff offline this morning, between phone calls and e-mail and this-n-that. For example, I did a nice little bit about Katherine dropping her pacifier into the washing machine (“Binkie!”), a biting note about the custody battle between two lesbians who adopted a child (conservatives, by denying marriage and adoption by couples to gays throw both adults and kids in this situation into a legal twilight zone, where none of the laws apply, and no precedents have been set; they then bitch about judicial activism and the need for new concepts like “psychological parent”), a stinging rebuke about the Bushies’ unwillingness to cooperate with the congressional intel committees looking at failures pre-9/11 (claiming that folks are too busy fighting the War on Terrorism does no good if you’re trying to find out if people are competent to fight it in the first place) and a few other things.

And then I managed to close the window I was doing it in, losing the frelling posts.

Not that today wasn’t already tense enough, both with a big presentation to upper IT management being done by my boss (written by me) on what my department does, and with the prospect of fall-out from a blog post/e-mail I sent out late last night to some folks about a difficult decision I’d been struggling with for a while (which decision was causing me sleepless nights, etc.).

Of course, that blog post and the MT-generated notification e-mail never went out. So I got the opportunity to send it out again. Which, I suppose, is an adequate start at penance for something.