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 you are here: shellen.com / jason / features / pinch hitting... written May 25, 2001 

Pinch Hitting for Evan Williams... Jason Shellen
It's been a hectic week to say the least. My updates to this site have been terse, meaningless drivel. Maybe some of you enjoy that sort of stuff but I neither enjoy writing it nor reading it. Unfortunately, I know that I will only be able to scratch the surface of what has gone on this week and my thoughts on it.

Saturday/Sunday: Ev leaves for Europe and I take on the server watching duties. 11 hours later I am busy putting the new Blogger Store up when one of our production servers becomes unresponsive and I need to bring it down and back up. Fun stuff. All is well in the end and I launch the store in the same night. Long night, no harm done. Lots of progress. The store starts to gain some decent momentum.

Monday: Dealing with paperwork for pending home refinancing. Find out that 'Flash is Evil' and 'Web economy bullshit generator' creator Dack Ragus is throwing in the towel on the daily weblog at dack.com. Supremely bummed out but oddly optimistic, I know I will get to ask him in person tomorrow about this since he will be in town on business. Work on new business development deals for Pyra. After dinner, pretend I am 19 when Allison and I take her sister out for a finals week good luck ice cream. Glad I wasn't 19 when we dropped her off to study. I find out that Greg Knauss is killing his blog too. What is going on?

Tuesday: Industry Standard comes out with their article on Ev. The closing tagline of the article is ' For Williams, interesting is more important than profitable.' The line haunts me the rest of the day. Pyra is in business, we are making money, we will continue to make money and are actively creating new products and sealing deals that are revenue generators. To dismiss Pyra as a hobby or a work of academia is not the truth. Next time, call me for the fact checking Mr. Lash.

3 PM: Fit hits the shan. T-1 line at Pyra goes dead. At the time, I think this is just an 'outage'. Many phone calls made to our provider. Lots of 'Well get back to you.' Very little 'getting back' being done. No answers to what is going on. Receive lots of email. Not only do all Blog*Spot bloggers go on an unintended hiatus but here are a *few* of the other sites affected by the outage: Blog*Spot, Newsblogger, Evhead, Onfocus, Megnut, a.wholelottanothing.org, BlogVoices, The End of Free, MetaFilter, the 5k and more.

High point of the day, meeting Dack and Ian for drinks. Dack in discussing many a website says ' When anything gets popular it starts to suck. That's why I wanted to call it quits.' Hard logic to argue with especially when you aren't being paid to create. Call our service provider at midnight to find out what is going on. They tell me that they won't have any answers till the morning.

Wednesday: At 7:30 AM I call Firstworld Communications the girl on the other end says, 'You do know that we don't do T-1 service anymore?' She procedes to tell me that they have killed the circuit for Pyra's T-1 and 'Didn't we get the email about that?'. They send me over to their 'sales' department to discuss getting service installed. Not reinstated. Installed. Forget that. Call Evan in Denmark to discuss options. He is floored. We make quick plans to deal with the outage.

I spoke to more ISP's than I care to speak with ever again. The long and short of it, getting any kind of DSL or T-1 connection will be a standard 3 to 4 week wait at the earliest. It's a loooong day. I looked at my email sent items, 55 email sent today. We have sold so many shirts that we are already reordering, Woo hoo!

Thursday: Wake up early to find out that this hasn't been the best day or two for a couple of other folks. Meg and Matt were laid off from KnowNow. Haven't heard back from Firstworld and getting a bit upset and considering Pyra's legal options at this point.

I remove 3 servers from the office for relocation and begin work on getting them back on line. Matt, Meg and Paul have been by to offload their info or pick up equipment. Negotiate with our rackspace provider for double our former capacity so that we can house the formerly in-house machines with the rest of the group. Work on some cool new stuff for the Blogger Store. TBA. Try to remain cheerful as 1000th person asks 'I have a Blog*Spot blog, why is it down?' and 'Can you post an update?'.

Friday: Data transfer for Blog*Spot is done, just waiting on some tweaks from Ev before it goes back up. Dinner tonight with potential licensee of Blogger technology.

I really want to go surfing this weekend but it's Memorial Day and their is a good chance that there will be more surfboards in the ocean than sand on the beach. Maybe I'll just take a siesta instead. If something breaks over the next 3 days, please be kind. Chances are I am already working on it.

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