Monday, August 11, 2008

I've been experiencing computer problems. This would be the cause for my huge delay in new content release. On top of this, my Yahoo Group was virtually inaccesible for almost a month now. I didn't think anyone would believe me if I said that - So I've copied and pasted the email yahoo tech support sent to me. It's quite funny and shocking in a way. (Just to let you all know, the problem has recently been resolved and I'm able to post to my own group again! Yeah!).
______________________________________________

Hello,
Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Groups Customer Care.
I'm writing with an update on the issue with your group being
inaccessible and to apologize: both for the length of time your group
has been down and for our failure to communicate what has been going on
to address the problem.
As background, Groups has a standard "hot back-up" system that enables
us to restore groups quickly if/when they are affected by a bug in the
system - like the issue that has affected your group. Unfortunately,
with this particular bug, it not only affected your group also affected
our ability to use our back-up system. As a result, we have had to turn
to our emergency "tape" back-up systems to restore your group. This
system is designed for major emergencies (like an earthquake or fire
that destroys our servers) rather than day-to-day restoration of an
issue within a group.
This has meant a slow recovery process for 2 reasons:
1. The emergency tapes are stored in a secure facility to which Groups
engineers didn't have immediate access.
2. The restore from our tape system had never been needed before and our
Operations team has discovered an issue in the process that we weren't
aware existed from the testing we did when we setup the system. This
issue needs to be fixed before we can complete a successful restore of
your group. We are currently working through this and feel we are
getting close to a resolution.
I apologize again for these problems and wanted to let you know that we
will thoroughly analyze what went wrong in this case to ensure that it's
not repeated in the future.
And I also want to apologize for our failure to keep you better informed
of what's been happening on our side. We also plan to review our systems
for communicating with Groups' users suffering from major bugs to make
sure we do a better job in that area as well.
In the interim, I will send you an update when we have successfully
restored your group. If we are unable to get your group back up and
running within the next 24-48 hours, I'll send an update on our
progress.
Thank you for your patience and please don't hesitate to contact us
while we continue to work on resolving this issue.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Groups Customer Care.
Regards,
Max
Yahoo! Customer Care

Friday, July 11, 2008

Today I'm offering a "sneak peak" of the upcoming Fairy Dust kit. I've a few finishing touches to the kit before release. For now though, here's a little something to bait you who are waiting. ;) This is a mini layout I did using pieces from my upcoming kit. It's available in .png and .psp file format. My kit will also be available in both file formats. No password needed on this download.
DOWNLOAD← (.png)
DOWNLOAD← (.psp)