Passes & Canyons Blog

Let me apologize up front that this post has nothing to do with motorcycles.

I’m a little aggravated this morning. Maybe you noticed–this site was down for 1 hour and 29 minutes. And that’s not the first time recently the site has been down, although that’s the longest time by far. I filed a trouble ticket with my web host and asked what the hell is going on, but have yet to hear anything from them. If they respond as they have in the past I’ll get some message such as “We’re sorry your site was down, it’s back up now.” No shit?

It’s enough to push me a lot farther along the way to going to a new web host. I’ve been growing increasing dissatisfied with NetPivotal for quite awhile now and this may be what pushes me over the edge.

If I do move to a new host, it will make a clean third strike for today. First I went over to my bank, Wells Fargo, to ask about some unexpected charges that showed up on our statements. Seems they have added a bunch of fees, and when I said that was not acceptable the reply was essentially, “Too bad.” Judy has wanted to dump Wells Fargo for a long time so I came home and emailed her a message saying “Let’s do it.” We’ll be moving our accounts to First Bank.

Then I went over to my gym, Bally Fitness. Yesterday the Aurora club moved into a new location and this was my first time there. Their card reader would not accept my card. The manager told me my membership is not valid at the new location, despite my having asked that exact question as soon as they announced they would be making the move. I told him that was all I needed to know and came home and canceled my automatic renewal. When my membership runs out in April I’ll join 24-Hour Fitness.

Don’t anybody mess with me today, I’m on a roll.

Recent from National Motorcycle Examiner
More motorcycle companies report increasing sales

Biker Quote for Today

If I can’t pass at a reasonable speed I do it unreasonably.

My apologies to anyone who tried in vain to reach this blog or website in the last 36 hours. A fire at what is reportedly the largest web server facility in the world, in Houston, put thousands of servers and tens of thousands of websites — including this one — out of commission for a day and a half. Here’s the notice my web host put up:

Server Issues:
We would like to make our customers aware that we are currently have some issues with our NS1.NETPIVOTAL.COM Primary nameserver and the Rose.netpivotal.com server. On Saturday evening at 4:55 in the Houston data centre where the two servers are located, an electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no servers were damaged or lost and the data is still safely on the server. There is no impact in any of our other servers.

So if you were inconvenienced, I’m very sorry. But I’m glad you’ve returned.

It was a really bad time for this to happen because I know from the statistics that this is the busiest time of year for this website. You may recall just two months ago that I was crowing that the website had had 3,000 unique visitors in one month for the first time ever. Well, just two months later we hit 4,000 unique visitors.

Now, this is really exciting for me but let me put it in perspective for you. This website went live in November of 2005. The first month it had 1,000 unique visitors was July of 2006. It was then June 2007 when it first had 2,000 unique visitors in one month. The 3,000 mark was hit then in March 2008 and now, May 2008, it already hit 4,000! And the very next morning the servers went out and everything was offline for 36 hours!

So welcome back, and now maybe we can get back to discussing important things, like motorcycles.

Biker Quote for Today

If you can’t get it going with bungee cords and electrician’s tape, it’s serious.