Friday night I was working on some website stuff. I've come to the conclusion that the Shoutbox has to go. I'm tired of good, discussionable comments getting wasted in the Shoutbox, rather than living on the entry page of the weblog post to which they are relevant. I don't want to argue about Mario v. Ratchet inside a two inch box. Something like that deserves paragraph after paragraph. (And actually Tony, that would be a SWEET podcast episode. We need to figure that out.)

I was working on getting Movable Type to pull out the last X comments, for a sidebar display... so anyone who comments would still get a front page link and momentary shining stardom. I finished the code on it, but I'm still not sure I like it.

Anyway, I was deep inside MT on that and some other stuff, so I triggered a full site rebuild. Which failed after about five minutes (I think it takes fourhman.com about ten or fifteen to complete a top-to-bottom rebuild). Failed rebuilds are a very scary thing, although less so since I switched to MySQL about a year ago.

I shortly realized that the entire fourhman.com domain was gone, so the flying fickle finger of fate pointed directly at Dreamhost. You know how when your power goes out for days and then all the TV stations fly into Power Crisis Emergency 2000 mode with hotlines and shelter info and whatever, only you can't get any of that because your fucking power is out? Well, when a web company goes down, the only thing they can do is hire another webco to host their emergency info page, so they can communicate with their million customers who now not only have dead websites, but also no email. Dreamhost does that right here.

Which is where I saw that, yes, indeed, all of Dreamhost was knackered. It's actually a rather amusing post:

Check out those nutty verb tenses. Perhaps foolishly, Dreamhost allows unfiltered commenting, which makes for some pretty hilarious ANGRY INTARNETS PEOPLE all over that page. fourhman.com is not my livelihood, so I tend to not care as much when Dreamhost goes belly-up. Usually it's just one server that flips, but in this case, the whole Dreamhost universe went south.

Funny sidebar: During all of that, I received a phone message from Josh, but I couldn't listen to it due to bad local reception. So, concerned that it might be about work but not THAT concerned, I sent him an IM to that effect. Then I walked down the hall to go to bed.

Two-thirds of the way there, I remembered that Josh's away message mentioned that he was at Caleb's... who happens to work for Gamestop. I ran back to the iMac and added this to my one-sided conversation with Josh: "You fucker. Caleb has it already, doesn't he." Several hours later, I received a phonecam pic of Caleb holding his copy of Smash Brawl and giving me the finger.

Anyway, fourhman.com was back within an hour or so. But that adventure is nothing compared to tonight's horror.

The setup: all week, the house has been just shy of floating away. This week we had some rather warm temps, so the ground all un-froze. Then we had a string of on-again, off-again showers, some days pretty serious stuff. So it's been water water everywhere. And we're new construction, so that means the ground isn't quite natural yet... we have puddles of standing water all over the yard, and we're still plugging various minor basement leaks. Our sump pump has been running about every two minutes for the last five days, belching water from our underground stream out towards the runoff ditch next door. This spring thaw is not all it's cracked up to be. In case you've been wondering what the webcam has been pointed at all week, that's the answer. It's me checking the sump area from work, to make sure there's no overflow or pipe leaks.

The day started out easily enough. We go to get our taxes done, Tony texts me that his wife is having a baby, we pull off some masterful cost-savings at CVS, Target and Wegman's.

Then about 6:15pm tonight, the power goes out. It was funny because Clark had just been flipping lights on and off in his toy room, because he has a bunch of action figures with light-up features. So he turns the lights off, then on... then the whole house goes dark.

Knowing how fast our sump pump reservoir fills up, I dash to the basement. It is already well over the floating bobber that triggers the pump to activate, but still eight inches from the top. Pretty much okay. Basic science says that at some point, you're going to hit an equilibrium with the ground water level, and that's where the water will stop flowing in. Looks like we're there.

Except that I check in again an hour later (AN HOUR? Jesus, how can power be out THIS LONG, I naively complain), and the water level has risen slightly. I bail out a couple gallons, and the reservoir fills right back up. I pretend I have some kind of innate intelligence for this kind of thing and estimate that the sump pit is going to overflow in four or five hours.

So I call around for help and advice. We try a mouth-to-hose siphon, which was awful and ineffective. I bail another couple dozen gallons, to no change. I briefly consider running out to Wal-Mart to buy a generator, just to get the sump pump back in order. I keep checking the pit every few minutes; and each time I head down the steps, I instinctually go for the light switch like an idiot. By 10:00pm, almost four hours after the power went out, I have resigned myself to the ultimate fallback plan: play DS for an hour, and then if the power hasn't come back, start moving shit out of the basement.

I settle in on the couch and open my DS card carrier. Just as I'm deciding to play that dopey Nodame Cantable DS game I imported along with Ouendan 2, the fucking vibrating chair cushion leaps on to full force, servos humming furiously and soothing forest noises erupting at top volume. The power is back.

Whenever you see those stupid either/or quizzes, where you're supposed to say choose whether you could live without running water or electricity, or between your left arm or electricity, or whatever, the answer is I need goddamn electricity, every time.

And yes, this whole night, I've been thinking "This better not screw up Smash Brawl tomorrow."