RAID5 is quite reliable as disk arrays go. So I can understand why having two disks in a five-disk array fail on Thursday morning took my hosts, Servelocity, somewhat by surprise. Which is the quick way of saying exactly what happened to the site over the last four-and-a-bit days.

There, that was painless, wasn't it?

Elsewhere, I appear to be stuffing my hours full of more minutes than they can feasibly cope with, or at least that's how it feels. For one thing, work-wise, we're mid-release cycle, and though there's a bit of a lull for me at the moment for logistical reasons I know it'll pick up to insanely busy levels towards the end of the week (perversely, I'm rather looking forward to it).

Writing-wise… Well, let's gloss over that by simply saying that I haven't done any of it for about three weeks. In fact the last time I did any writing that wasn't an email or a blog post or a hastily scribbled plot note for novel-the-second was in the Starbucks on Horseferry Road. I wrote a few paragraphs of a short story called, tentatively, Branches and rather enjoyed it and then I got tied up with work and haven't really had time to go back to it. And once again I find myself thinking that I should get back to writing but more specifically that I should get on with writing novel-the-second before it turns into the novel-I-meant-to-write that all wannabe writers have tucked away at the back of their minds. That thought terrifies me, frankly; it's too good a story to waste (though I'm not yet sure that I can do it justice). Trouble is, Branches is pretty good so far, too, especially since it's my first foray into hard(er) core Science Fiction.