Archive for the 'meta' Tag
Blame it on Dreamhost.
Wondering what happened to this website and many others? Here’s an excerpt from an email that Dreamhost just sent me:
Unfortunately, because of the file server problems, in order to get your
sites back up, you will now need to REUPLOAD all your content. We are
still trying to recover the data from peeler, but at this point it looks
like that process may take a few days, if it is even possible at all.
So, while I’m somewhat at fault for not doing my own offsite backups, Dreamhost has tremendously failed by:
- not maintaining their servers appropriately
- not having redundant backups
- not communicating with their customers in a timely manner (it took over 30 hours of downtime before I was sent an email)
- expecting customers to keep local backups of all of their content
- spending their energy promoting unlimited bandwidth and disk space to new customers instead of fixing the above issues
I can only hope that they will redeem themselves with some extraordinary customer support over the next few days. I can still say that Dreamhost has provided excellent service for the most part, but it’s the times like these that can make us forget about all of that in an instant.
For more information about this particular issue, see this post at the Dreamhost Status Blog.
December 15, 2008 | 1 comment | tags: customerservice, frustration, meta, webhosting
Long Time, No Post
According to Technorati, it’s been a full 75 days since my last post on this blog. That’s quite a long time. Since then:
- I finished my freshman year of college.
- I interned with a pretty cool group at Intel and attended Research@Intel Day in Santa Clara.
- I got on a plane and flew to Amsterdam, where I’m posting from now.
When I was originally thinking about starting a “serious” blog, Rajat’s first response was that I needed to define what I would write about. I think that part’s taken care of. There are plenty of interesting things to write on, like what I’m doing in Europe — I just need to sit down and get it all on (digital) paper. Hopefully I can cover all of the backlog with a barrage of posts in the next few days and start blogging regularly again.
August 7, 2007 | no comments | tags: amsterdam, meta, personal, studyabroad, work
Sunil’s got a blog
In the past few years, the blogosphere has gone from zero to sixty million. My goal for this blog is not to simply add more noise to the deafening crowd, but to publish something relevant to a significant portion of the general public.
As Lawrence Lessig writes in Free Culture, an internet created and moderated by users like ourselves carries the potential to revolutionize the way we seek and value information:
The Internet has unleashed an extraordinary possibility for many to participate in the process of building and cultivating a culture that reaches far beyond local boundaries. That power has changed the marketplace for making and cultivating culture generally, and that change in turn threatens established content industries. The Internet is thus to the industries that built and distributed content in the twentieth century what FM radio was to AM radio, or what the truck was to the railroad industry of the nineteenth century: the beginning of the end, or at least a substantial transformation.
I strongly believe in the Internet’s potential as a resource for humanity, through the proliferation of useful user-created content. We’ve already seen this through numerous blogs or, more notably, Wikipedia.
This is my try.
I hope that you’re able to get something out of this. Thanks for reading.
About
Hi, I’m Sunil Garg. I’m an undergraduate student of Computer Science at the University of Washington.
I grew up in Beaverton, Oregon, where I graduated from Southridge High School in 2006. I’m currently an intern at Pelago, the company that’s building Whrrl to help you discover the world around you. In the past, I’ve worked at Vernier Software and Intel.
I started this blog in 2007 to publish my thoughts about the things I’m interested in, and do so on a semi-regular basis. As you’ll probably come to realize, these interests include technology, software, the Web, social networking, travel, public policy, and music, among many others. Now that you’re here, feel free to poke around — hopefully you’ll find something useful.
If you want to get in touch, drop me an email at sunil@sunilgarg.com.
Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer: If it’s not clear already, this is my personal weblog. As such, the views I express here are mine alone and should not be attributed to my employer or anyone else. It’s quite likely that something I write may be wrong or misguided, and I encourage you to say so in the comments. Similarly, I don’t take responsibility what you write here, and will not be held liable for your words. I do, however, reserve the right to moderate comments in any manner I see fit in order to preserve constructive and polite discourse.
March 26, 2007 | Comments Off | tags: meta