Kimler Adventure Pages (http://randsco.com)

Fried Server

Atlanta, Georgia - Well laugh out loud, eh? After all that bragging and feeling cocky about being on a new, super-duper, faster-than-lightning server ... the hard-drive took a nose-dive, over the weekend.

Astute readers will have noticed that www.randsco.com was "off the air" from Saturday night till Tuesday morning. OUCH!

The new server is fast as a Ferrari, but like the car, needs to spend a great deal of time in the mechanic's shop.

At the moment, we've retreated back to the shared-hosting space we were so eager to leave. Talk about embarrassing!

The hard drive took a nose dive sometime Saturday night. The server was up and down for most of Sunday, then went completely black from that point forward. We couldn't even ping the bloody thing, let alone log in or *gasp* administrate anything.

Out of the bloody rubble of 1's and 0's, my mate managed to ressurect the Randsco database. (Did I mention that we'd been too busy to set up any type of backup plan?)

I've cobbled it back together again and most of the post and comment data appear fine. The only problematic bit is that we've lost an entire month and a half of changes to files outside the database. So if things don't work, or look a little wonkers ... that's why and gradually, we'll get it all sorted out.

Pressure Cooker

Comox, BC - It was last reported that Scott would be attending 'live fire' training. Unfortunately, Scott wasn't allowed to participate, for medical reasons.

In a very twisted turn of events, our Randsco founder and Chief toilet-bowl Swabber (that's Mr. Swabber to you) was told that his blood pressure was boiling over.

"You're ready to pop a gasket," said one Comox firefighter, "This is the highest reading I think I've ever seen!" (Response after measuring Scott's blood pressure at a mind-numbing 210/110, which is measured in millimeters of mercury, or Hg).

After the "no-play" weekend, Scott's been to the doctor, has had a series of tests (blood, urine and ECG) and will be meeting with his family doctor tomorrow morning. Scott's stage 2 hypertension may be caused by a number of factors and the treatment varies, depending on contributions from each. It may also be symptomatic of other underlying health issues.

Of course, stress is one of the big factors in high blood pressure. Things like ... hmmm, let's see ... servers going belly up!

"I had no idea," said Scott, who up until now, has always had blood pressure readings at the normal range (120/70).

"You discover something like this and suddenly, you feel OLD," he said.