Things have been pretty crazy around here (life, school, job search, web worms) so I apologize for the relative silence. But I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy new year. I'm anticipating great changes around here for the new year, and I wish the same for everyone else out there.

Thanks to Dan's query and Google's wonderful cache I believe most of the lost posts have been recovered and restored. After being forced to reread them through the recovery process, I almost wish I had never recovered them because they're pretty much rubbish. Anyway, it's possible I could recover johnnyconvo comments and perhaps even HollaBack comments, but I think I'll spare myself some sanity and just let it go.

In other news, I'm current currently proofreading my thesis, which means by my standards, it's completely written. Hopefully my committee's standards are as low as mine.

According to a system status message (that wasn't sent out to customers, I had to find it myself), there was a major server crash that included the corruption of all nightly backups. Well, as it turns out the most recent backup they had (stored remotely) was from sometime in October. That's why all of the stuff that's happened since then (posts, comments, johnnyconvo comments, etc.) are gone.

I don't really want to ramble on and on about this, so to summarize, this situation basically stinks but most of the blame for lack of backups falls on me for not executing my own routine backups. The fact that the webhost creates backups for their customers is a service that, while common, is more of a added feature than a requirement. However, this more recent forgivable inconvenience is an anomoly in a growing list of inconveniences that are hardly ever explained or resolved with any sort of compensation. So, suffice it to say that as soon as someone hires me, I will be changing servers.

Oh and to the participants of the Ralle Cup fantasy racing, this definitely means we'll have an automated points updater for next year because I'm definitely not going back and re-entering all of that race data by hand. JohnnyH, you're still the official winner.

I just wrote the (literal) last line of my thesis. I'm not finished yet. I still have some refining to do, which means sentences will be added and/or deleted, but the actual last line has been written. Oh joyous day!

(In case you're wondering, I estimate overall completeness of rough draft to be 95%)

Besides looking for a job, I will now spend some of my time in the coming weeks looking for a way to do what this guy did.

A ball that doesn't sting? Ha! Just wait until you meet me in the Dodgeball National Championships!