News Archive for 2003

October 13, 2003: THE OUTAGE TODAY was due to a major equipment failure at my upstream provider, MCI Canada. What made things worse was that it was a holiday Monday (Canadian Thanksgiving) and thus it took them over 9 hours to have a technician on site to resolve the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks, hope we won't have another outage for a little while now!

August 15, 2003: THE EAST COAST POWER OUTAGE hit us big time here in Ottawa. We had power restored for a few hours late at night, but the power went out again later in the morning. We're advised that we're still on a rotating blackout schedule as the city is getting no more than one half to two thirds the power it needs. I brought the server back up with a UPS, but if the power goes down again, so will the server, so be prepared for unannounced outages.

August 1, 2003: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: Richard Bartle's new book, "Designing Virtual Worlds" is now on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0131018167

July 4, 2003: HAPPY 227TH BIRTHDAY, America!

June 2, 2003: TODAY I RECEIVED not one but TWO undeliverable message notices in response to e-mails I purportedly sent as sysop@mud2.com to various recipients.
I DID NOT SEND THOSE E-MAILS. I DO NOT SEND UNSOLICITED E-MAIL ATTACHMENTS. If you received an e-mail purportedly coming from me urging you to open an attachment, please don't: erase the e-mail instead. The attachment, in all probability, is a worm/virus, and the e-mail is intended to trick you into opening it and infecting your system. In general, it is a very good idea NEVER to open an unsolicited attachment. Needless to say, installing a good virus scanner program, securing your system with the latest security updates, and not opening strange e-mails, not even in a preview window, are also on the list of recommended practices if you wish to avoid infecting your system with an unfriendly piece of malware.