Tag Archives: email

Best Laid Plans

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

~ Robert Burns

Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, 1787

Holy crap has this week been… well, one of those weeks.

Some of my friends have been concerned about how busy I’ve been of late and my truthful response has been that I’m at a very happy level of busyness. I’m juggling precisely the right number of balls to keep me focused and productive without it becoming overwhelming. But, I’d say, it’s also that exact level of busyness that means if anything goes wrong, if I get sick or my computer explodes, everything is going to tumble down around me like a house of cards in a hurricane.

Tuesday night when I went to bed everything was okay. Wednesday when I checked my email, the wind began to blow.

I use two different web hosts to host my various domains and email. In addition to the email addresses hosted by those hosts (holy crap I need an editor to cut the use of the word ‘host’ in this sentence!) I also use Gmail (two private and one shared account) and keep a Hotmail account for nostalgic reasons. Wednesday morning all of the email addresses associated with a specific web host could receive email but not send it.

Correcting that issue has consumed my week. I won’t bore you with the details, but I will say it is both frustrating, depressing and strangely satisfying to remotely give an expert control of your computer and watch them do exactly the same things you’ve been doing, over and over, and get exactly the same results.

As of half an hour ago things appear to be fixed and back to normal (*touch wood*), but I’ve thought that at several points throughout this process and been wrong, so we’ll see. In the end even the support guy who eventually fixed the problem (Thank you, Mike!) doesn’t have a clue what caused it or why his fix worked, just that it does. Or seems to. For now. (See how confident I’m feeling? LOL)

So if you got an email from me this week with a weird reply-to address, I apologise.

If you sent me an email on Wednesday and Thursday that I should have replied to by now and haven’t, please re-send it.

If I told you I’d send you something by the end of this week, please forgive me if that actually turns out to be by the end of next week.

My house of cards is lookin’ a bit blown about, but the foundation is good so I’m going to start rebuilding it… on Monday.

Have a great weekend!

Post-con Email

One of the crazy things about going on vacation or to a convention is seeing my inboxes when I return. It never fails to shock and impress me. I just got back from When Words Collide (oh my gawd! Several blog posts will be coming about that! So much yay!) and though I’d checked my mail a little bit, the hotel’s wireless was less than awesome and the laptop I took meant I had to use Webmail (which I hate) so I came home to–

Jofigure account: 834 new messages
Niteblade account: 383 new messages
*mumble* account: 152 new messages
WWP account: 9 new messages

I bet other people had even crazier numbers but I thought it might be fun to share mine… and also keep a record so I can compare it with my World Fantasy numbers 😉