Hallo again to all.

Anglicans Online is a volunteer, noncommercial venture. We are funded entirely by contributions from our staff and those readers who support us. We keep our server computers in our homes, not in expensive data centres. While this saves money, it exposes us to, well, Acts of God — more than professional best practices might indicate. We don't mind, and we trust you'll bear with us.

Most Anglican churches, save perhaps for the very wealthiest, are constantly in need of a new roof, new windows, new furnace, new pews, better telephones, all manner of temporalities, as the old legal word has it. Why should we be any different than the world we write about?

This week the coldest weather in many years gripped New England, and the electric power went out in our city for a number of hours. So we brought in some wood, lit a fire in the hearth, and prayed that the cold wouldn't damage our computers.

Alas, it did.

One of our server computers froze, which destroyed the lubricant in a hard drive. And the hard drive gave up its ghost. If we were a bank or an upscale online merchant, we'd have backup generators and backup servers, with backup staff to help deploy them. But we're just Anglicans Online. It will take us a few days to build a new server and restore data; today we are going to scrape frost, shovel snow, and pay attention to all that we must in the offline world. So forgive this little squib of a letter...

If you live in our neighbourhood, broadly writ, you're coping, too. If you live half a planet away, where it may be too hot for your taste, please know that we're thinking quite enviously of you. It's much warmer inside our kitchen freezer than it is in our front garden. Wherever you live, we hope that you never need hear the sound of a hard drive whose spindle lubricant has frozen.

See you next week, presumably somewhat thawed — our servers and ourselves.

Cynthia McFarland cmcf@anglicansonline.org	Brian Reid reid@anglicansonline.org

Last updated: 11 January 2004
URL: http://anglicansonline.org