Progress
We managed to recover my old mysql database, and I managed to rescue all the missing comments and put them back where they belong. And the mailing list data, which was even more important, though I will probably have to go in and re-install and re-customize all the php because those files appear to be gone for good. I could attempt to rescue forum activity, but I’m afraid to touch that data structure – best to leave well enough alone at this point I think. So all in all it’s been mostly a loss of site uptime, man hours, and faith in computers; thankfully no serious permanent data losses.
This job as an independent musician has been looking suspiciously like my old job writing database software lately – not a bad thing really, it’s nice to get a code fix once in a while. Now if I could just remember where my guitar is…
Disaster
You may have noticed a distinct lack of, well, everything here at jonathancoulton.com. On Friday I realized that I had done enough work on the new server that I was starting to feel a little nervous about not having a decent backup – some files and data are thoughtfully still made available to me by my old host, the incredibly reliable and non-hard-drive-deleting Hostbaby, but it’s about a month old. So I purchased a backup hard drive from my new host and asked them to install it on my fancy dedicated server. In doing so, they somehow erased my original hard drive. Oops!
So I’ve spent the weekend in contact with a very competent tech wizard who’s been trying to rescue the data (hint: he is NOT the same guy who erased my hard drive). In theory this should work pretty well, but in practice it doesn’t seem to be working at all. So I’ve spent a bunch of time putting month-old data back on this site, and recovering recent posts from the Google Reader feed (which Google caches). All your comments from the last month or so are currently lost (i.e., belong to us), also anything that happened in the forums in the last month. The former may change if we actually do recover the data, the latter I think is not worth the trouble of attempting a crazy data merge. And my new mailing list was just set up and imported and cleaned when disaster struck – I don’t have the stomach to do all that work again at the moment. I’ll wait another day and see what if anything gets recovered. But all mp3s should be back where they were, and the store should work again. I’m sure I broke a few things, so let me know if there’s a page or a link that’s not working.
This sure was annoying, but I understand that these things happen sometimes. And I know from experience, but forgot this time, that when it comes to hardware upgrades and backups, you should always expect something ridiculously improbable to happen. Once when I wrote software for a living, I was typing so fast in DOS that I somehow managed to fire off “del *.*” when I was in the root of our office’s shared directory on the server. They had a good backup so we only lost a few hours – I was not fired, but I was certainly very embarrassed. Hopefully after we get the data all sorted out, these guys will step up and show me enough love to make me feel better.
A friendly reminder from someone who just got screwed: back up all your data today…
Things Coming Up
Just an update on some things in the pipeline. First the stuff I know for sure:
Thursday 6/21:
I’ll be a guest at Dave Hills’ “The Dave Hill Explosion” at UCB in New York. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing yet, probably playing some music and pretending to be funny like Dave Hill. Word is, Hodgman is also a guest.
http://www.myspace.com/davehillexplosion
http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-004842389-5
Friday 7/27:
I’ll be doing two shows at Milkboy in Ardmore, PA with Paul and Storm. Two shows! One at 7:30 and the other at 10:15. There will certainly be some content overlap in these two sets, so don’t feel like you need to come to both of them. I mean, don’t you people have lives?
Early show: http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-004842449-6
Late show: http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-004842503-3
PAX 8/24-8/26
It’s true, I’m playing at PAX along with a lot of other great musicians. I don’t have all the details yet, but the show will be sometime that weekend. Stay tuned for details.
Friday 8/31:
Show with Paul and Storm at the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA at 7:30. Expect the standard sort of rocking.
http://eventful.com/events/E0-001-004479292-8
Bumbershoot 9/1-9/3:
I will be appearing on the comedy stage at Bumbershoot in Seattle 9/1-9/3. There will be both music and comedy from me. More details soon.
http://bumbershoot.com/
And it’s a little far off to be certain about the details here, but I can tell you for sure that there will be some kind of tour with Paul and Storm happening mid-September on the west coast that may include a swing into a few cities in Texas. A couple dates are set already: Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 9/14, Triple Door in Seattle on 9/23. I’ll add the rest of them to the calendar as they get firmed up, but expect stops in LA and Portland, and possibly some stuff in Austin, Houston and Dallas somewhere around 9/18-9/20.
Thanks, I just wanted to get all that off my chest.
Rock Band
The makers of the game Guitar Hero are looking for suggestions of songs to include in their new game Rock Band. I don’t know much about the game, but I’m sure it would be about a thousand times better if it had a great song in it like Code Monkey. I’m just saying.
Monkeys: attack!
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