Dear Members of Simphoni. 

 Some of you may have noticed that a few hours ago, on the morning of Sunday, October 7, 2007, the entire Simphoni site went down until just now.  I would like to state for the record that this was a planned and necessary site outage, which was required in order to perform maintenance on the database, and to install several terrific upgrades.  I would like to say that, but it isn’t true.  Instead, what really happened was that a large bull named Rexer got loose in the Simphoni China Shop.  I began editing user permissions at the site, relevant to a change of personnel, within mere seconds of waking up in the morning and before downing even my first sip of coffee.  Before anyone could say “reticulating splines”, I had deleted the entire Simphoni account from the server!

Looking back on it now, it’s almost funny.  Almost.  But that simple mistake of mine this morning came very close to spelling the end of SIMphoni as we know it.  After some frantic telephone calls to our Tech Admin Sdrawkcab,  and IMs with Jirnsum and Gil, I began making concrete plans to schedule plastic surgery for myself, file papers in court to change my name, and to move to a new city where I would have started a new life entirely from scratch.  Fortunately, the terrific support staff at DreamHost was able to restore everything: files, software, news items, posts - everything!   Thanks to sdrawkcab for quick action on this, and helping to get things set back up again.

I apologize for the site outage we experienced this morning, and pledge to leave the major technical heavy-lifting to trained, authorized personnel in the future.

 Rexer