Jim
Good email. I'd like to thank you for all the work you and your team does to
keep this site up. I know exactly what you are going through!
Very classic case of Murphy.
Mike VA3MW
At 05:04 PM 11/9/99 , Jim Reisert AD1C wrote:
>The CT Vault at http://www.contesting.com/ctvault finally appears to be back
>up. Thanks to Bill Fisher, W4AN and his staff at akorn.net for getting it
>back on-line.
>
>Unfortunately, the data on the site is from a few weeks back (last full backup
>they had), but I am sure that K1EA will upload CT 9.45 and CT 9.46 to the web
>as soon as possible. I will fix up the links to the database files when I get
>home tonight.
>
>Now, a little history about what happened:
>
>Some time late Thursday night local (early Friday a.m. UTC), someone made a
>mistake and wiped out a good portion of the www.contesting.com web site. This
>took out not only the CT vault, but the WriteLog and NA web sites as well.
>That person (who shall go unnamed) informed Bill W4AN immediately that he had
>made a mistake. But Bill was in Reno, NV getting for operating SS from K5RC's
>QTH and could not get things back up from there.
>
>To compound problem, Matt KC1XX and his family were out of town on vacation so
>they could not respond to problems at any of the CT telephone numbers. K1EA
>and I responded as promptly as we could to direct E-mail requests for the
>updated software by E-mailing CT out as an attachment (or a pointer to another
>site) to anyone who asked, no questions asked. During Saturday, my E-mail
>connection was down for several hours somewhere between MIT and MediaOne, but
>I was still able to access my mail on contesting.com. I came in from yard
>work just about every hour to check for any new messages, to get guys going in
>time for the contest.
>
>In short, it was a mistake, that was exacerbated by the site owner and the CT
>sales and support force being out of town. We tried to handle the problem as
>best we could. We did NOT announce to the reflector that the site was down,
>in my opinion to avoid the "hoarding" problem whenever there is a shortage of
>something (i.e. if you tell everyone that something is not available, they
>will ask for it anyway, even if they don't need it). We're sorry it took so
>long for the site to get back on-line.
>
>Fortunately, we did not get too many angry messages. But there is a lesson to
>be learned here. The rule changes had been announced for several months. CT
>9.42 was released on October 3 to handle the new rules, a full month before
>the contest. Therefore, there was plenty of time for people to download the
>updated software before the contest, and obviously many did. It is
>unfortunate that some decided to wait until the last minute. CT is a work in
>progress. As such, there are likely to be problems with the software in YOUR
>particular situation which can not be resolved in the hour or minutes before
>the contest. Therefore, it is prudent to download the software early and try
>it out in your station well before the contest, in case you need to contact
>the support staff or K1EA for help or a bug fix. Does your company use
>untested software in a production environment? It's not a good idea in a
>contest either.
>
>In closing, it's only a hobby. Even if you had the old version of CT, you
>could make notes during the contest for the occasional QSO that didn't log
>properly, so you could fix them up after the contest. And paper and pencil
>still work, and probably will for as long as they make paper and pencils.
>
>73 - Jim AD1C
>
>--
>Jim Reisert AD1C <jjreisert@alum.mit.edu>
>http://people.ne.mediaone.net/ad1c/ <---- new home
>
>
>--
>Submissions: ct-user@contesting.com
>Administrative requests: ct-user-REQUEST@contesting.com
>WWW: http://www.k1ea.com/
>Questions: owner-ct-user@contesting.com
>
=================================================
Mike Walker VA3MW
Corbeil Contest Club
http://www.qrz.com/wrad/directory.cgi?VA3MW
--
Submissions: ct-user@contesting.com
Administrative requests: ct-user-REQUEST@contesting.com
WWW: http://www.k1ea.com/
Questions: owner-ct-user@contesting.com
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