Our website went dark today around 4:00am PST due to recent winds that severed our internet connection. In addition we also lost power for an extended period of time today starting at 7:52am PST. Everything now appears to be returning to normal. The server however will be working a little harder to catch up with the backlog of transactions that have accumulated during the outage and should be back to normal by the end of today. Thank you for your patience.

A new version of the popular Day/Night Terminator Display is now available for download. This new version corrects a few bugs that caused a scrolling problem under Windows Vista and Windows 7. Also a longstanding and difficult bug was corrected. For a complete list, see the readme file. Download here.

The past week hasn't been kind to our IT staff. The first indication that something was wrong was when our primary server which handles our website measured a dramatic drop in its CPU fan speed which resulted in a temperature spike on that CPU. Naturally, the server initiated an automated shutdown as a result. Once the fan was replaced and the server restarted, everything appeared back to normal. That 'normal' feeling didn't last long. Several hours later, its power supply failed. So we pulled the old supply out and replaced it with a brand new one. Once again we restarted the server and were again thinking 'everything's back to normal.' Once again, that feeling didn't last. The next day, one of the hard drives in its RAID array failed. So we pulled the hard drive out, replaced it, and restarted the server. The following day, the server begins crashing left and right for every little thing; open a window - crash; access the website it serves - crash! So now we have to repair what data corruption has occured. It turns out that this was alot easier than it first appeared. It was done with one simple utility called ChkDsk that fixed our crashing issue by repairing errors on the volume. We thought we were out of the woods but then our backbone to the internet was severed knocking our (now repaired) server offline for two days. At least this last problem wasn't with any of our hardware. We don't anticipate anything else going wrong but we arn't crossing fingers either. Needless to say, the server's going to be a little extra busy the next few days as it plays catch-up with website and e-mail traffic.

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