Ben and Mena - 6 Broken Parts

The phrase "civility in blogging" kept on popping into my head. When I say "civility in blogging," I'm basically referring to the demeanor or the desired demeanor that we conduct ourselves when we're blogging.

Wait hold that thought...

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fucking fucked up fucking fuck? You need to be more civil, you fucking backchannel asshole. Yes, you, you fucked up fucker you. Fucking fuck the fucking fuck off.

Now as I was saying...

Civility is defined as a courteous act or courteous acts that contribute to smoothness and ease in dealings and social relationships.

I want to talk about the future of blogging and what it all means and about civility in blogging, oh on second thought, fuck it, I just wanta talk about Vox.

Moveable Type? What's that? You mean you haven't checked out Vox? You living under a rock? Support? What you kidding, right? Oh problems, problems, we can't scale, spam comments, server problems, oh oh, help us Anil, conjur up some of that spooky social media marketing magic and make all the complainers go away. Anil do something! Smooth talk us out of this jam.

Anil: "As far as our commitment to Movable Type itself goes, there's no question that we've had a lot on our plates over the past few years, and MT hasn't gotten the love and attention the community deserves. But instead of looking at the past, you might want to look at today, never mind the past four years of wholesale shoddy performance, it's all about the here and now. Get with the program you morons!"

Are we still A-List? People don't seem to like us as much anymore. No clue as to why. We've seen failures in our storage servers. We've seen failures in our software. We've seen failures in our hardware. We've seen failures in our networking equipment. We've seen failures in our databases. We've seen failures with our ability to deal with spam. We can't scale. And there are a number of big issues that have always bothered us about all of our products. But we are still cute. We are cute. We need more money. Some people have the innate ability to consistently write wonderfully, but for the rest of you, we have a whole menu section of blogs. How did I get to be 30 years-old and be so utterly clueless about make-up and beauty? I dunno.

We are currently in the process of recovering data that was unavailable after the service outage. This includes posts, comments, newly created blogs, etc. Say a prayer for us. We are planning a 48 to 64 hour outage next weekend. This is to complete the network maintenance we've been performing over the last several weeks.

We are a Consumer Tool, noooo, it's not working really well, so let's just call it a Developer Tool, Developers are used to dealing with alotta crap, they will understand. Oh, Ben and I went to the Golden Gate Kennel Club Dog Show on Sunday.

We've become aware that it's pretty difficult for our customers to find service-related news throughout our various weblogs and new sources. So here's an easy linkable guide:

Recap of Monday's TypePad Outages
Recap of Tuesday's TypePad Outages
Recap of Wednesday's TypePad Outages
Recap of Thursday's TypePad Outages
Recap of Friday's TypePad Outages
Recap of Saturday's TypePad Outages
Recap of Sunday's TypePad Outages
Recap of the Server and Data Losses
Second-by-Second Real-Time Tracking of TypePad Outages
Future Week Forecasts of TypePad Outages
Future Monthly Forecasts of TypePad Outages
Yearly Charts of TypePad Outages
TypePad Update: Data Down at 4/11, 11:01 PM
TypePad Update: Back Up at 12/16, 03:38 AM
Service Tickets: Which will be ignored.

Walking down the street today, Ben and I saw some gross looking mass splattered on the sidewalk. But ohhhh, Justin Timberlake has a good work ethic. Swwoooon. You can just tell by the way he performs. Maybe it's because he grew up in the South and has been performing since he was a child and all those years on the Mickey Mouse Club taught him a little something about putting on a good show. But I have to say that I so miss Orville Redenbacher's Sour Cream & Onion Microwave Popcorn. And I would have to say that Double Dare, by far, was the show that I was most addicted to as a child. I may not have nicknames, but I certainly have made up a lot of nicknames for others. This is partially why "Mean" is such an appropriate nickname, I guess. 'Cause all I need is a moment alone to give you my fucking fucked up fucking tone. You don't dare wanta cross me. Fucker!

Does it make me want to buy Sour Patch kids? Um, do I need a reason to buy Sour Patch kids? My sweetheart, Maddy, greets me when I'm working on my computer. Unfortunately, whenever she sees her picture on the screen she growls. In fact, I had to discontinue using my photos screensaver because she'd start barking as soon as her picture showed up on it. Frightening to know that Jerri Blank could exist in any form, but even more frightening would be being in this woman's skin. Every taupe leathery inch of it. Well, I love blogging for the sake of blogging. And I'm just amazed by how much easier moblogging has become.

We are cute. We are cute. It's quite unbelievable that we've been doing this for all these years. This has been a bad year for TypePad's performance and general availability, and we'd like to talk about a number of the issues we've faced, how frustrated they make us. But never mind that, check out Project Doomed Comet. Oh this running a company is hard. I like Westies. Building Spieill Checick and WYSIWYG is a lot harder than it seems. We can't scale. But we are still cute. I mean just look at us. Cute as a bug. We are cute. We are cute. As many of you have noticed, during the last couple of months, well ok...years, TypePad performance has not been what we aspire to and you pay for. But as with most web companies, I can do nothing more than apologize, a weak sentiment without action to back it up.

Blog the world
Blog the world
Let them know it's Christmastime

But hey, we are still cute. Cute. You can't hate us. We are cute. I won't claim that I'm brilliant, but I've got my good share of social dysfunction. We are cute. Well I am cuter than Ben. But Ben is an artsy-fartsy fuck who needs to listen to obscure stuff or pure pop to feel better than me. I don't think he reads. Not sure, never seen him with a book. We are cute.

We have had eternally persistent problems with keeping the service running reliably. Oh TypePad wiped out Dilbert. So sorry. And so sorry about wiping out all those thousands (or millions) of comments. You want a 30 day free use voucher? Will that make up for losing all your data? And to our complaining and never-ending bitching customers, I have only one thing to say: "What the fuck? All day yesterday you've been total assholes."

"We experienced a database problem and needed to take the system offline to repair it"
"We experienced a server problem and needed to take the system offline to repair it"
"We experienced a backup problem and needed to take the system offline to repair it"
"We experienced an equipment failure and needed to take the system offline to repair it"
"We experienced a software problem and needed to take the system offline to repair it"
"We experienced a human-error problem and needed to take the system offline to repair it"
"We experienced a problem of which we are not yet quite sure and needed to take the system offline to repair it"
"We suffered from lack of sleep and decided to take the system offline to get some much-needed shut-eye"

I offer some brief impressions of the Web 2.0 conference, a very worthwhile conference with a buzz we have never quite experienced before, as I missed the first bubble. We are cute. We are cute. During the course of talking about weblogging and how communication has evolved, I made a comment that, as usual, didn't come out as I planned. The way we blog and communicate is changing and our own online practices. I am not sure what that all means or even how it is changing or if I just haven't had enough sleep, but this is something worth talking about. Give the Gift of a Blog. For the first four years of TypePad, Ben would just point and grunt as his preferred method of communication. We are cute. We are cute. We need more money. Neoteny will help. More money! We are cute. We are cute. Oh this running a company is hard. Help, help, help. We are cute. We are cute. We've seen failures in our storage servers, failures that we had never seen before. We are cute. We are cute.

Equally exciting were the non-celebrities who came up to me after my talk and told me that they never considered starting a blog before hearing my talk. I give back to the little people. Comet entered Alpha testing last month and we've been doing quick iterations based on our testers' experiences. Hey, you intern dork, run to the store and get me a months supply of Tylenol and 2 dozen donuts. Like now!

I had the pleasure to participate and speak at CRUD which was really quite the best conference I have attended. Partly because I was able to speak about something I'm so passionate about: the personal side of blogging and why it will change the way we record our lives. But hey, fuck you, you backchannel naysayers. Fuuuuuuuuccccccccck you. What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fucking fucked up fucking fuck? You need to be more civil, you fucking backchannel asshole.

Can't sleep. Socks will eat me.

I'm very happy to break my weblogging silence by posting the quintessential top of blogdex pet movie. Oh heck, we've just seen a failure in a piece of networking equipment that had never failed before, and so on, ranging from hardware failures to software failures. We are cute. We are cute. We need more money. We apologize for the poor service you've experienced over the past four years, and also for the lack of official communication from our blogs. We need someone who knows how to run an actual company. We can't scale. We can't scale. LiveJournal, 8 million users and counting! Maybe 400 still active, with maybe a few dozen actually worth reading. But 8 million served, 400 digested.

Ooh blogs, do you know what that's worth?
They say in heaven blogs come first
We'll make heaven a place on earth
Ooh blogs, a heaven on earth...

We've seen failures in our storage servers. We've seen failures in our software. We've seen failures in our hardware. We've seen failures in our networking equipment. We can't scale. Oh this running a company is hard. We've seen more failures in our storage servers. TypeKey had some long-awaited improvements. We can't scale. But hey, we are still cute. LiveJournal merchandise is on the way, cool schwag. Well that's one thing we can sorta handle. But then we've seen failures in our database. Could you send us your information again? What is the deal with angry puppets? I mean really! Have you ever noticed how many angry puppets appear on television?

Cool Schwag, wow, Cool Schwag, man even more Cool Schwag. Cool Schwag! I am so excited. It is a rare occasion that I attend a lunch or dinner with people from work and some portion of the meal isn't spent playing with camera phones, PDAs, cameras or computers. We are cute. We are cute. Earn money, keep us alive, add text ads to your site. Oh this running a company is hard. We apologize for the poor service you've experienced. We can't scale.

We can blog if we want to, we can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don't blog and if they don't blog
Well they're no friends of mine

Sorry that I haven't written on dollarshort or voxtrott for the past 8 months. This running a company is hard. But I just had to write about the passing of my first pet, Lolly. We've just seen another failure in a piece of networking equipment, but we are still cute. Another failure, oh another one, oh one more, oh, oh, helppppp, hellppppp, help. What are we going to do -- trust falls? But we are still cute. I mean just look at us. Both still cute as a bug (but not the software kind of bug, no no). We've seen failures in our storage servers. We've seen failures in our software. We've seen failures in our hardware. We've seen failures in our networking equipment. We've seen failure. It's seen us. But at the end of the day, we are still cute. We are cute. But I think "hating" smooth Muppets is the definition of using a word lightly and I should probably just get over it.

But all you backchannel naysayers, fucking fuck the fucking fucked-up fuck off and be civil. You motherfuckingoddamnworthlessexcuses forhumanbeingspurepiecesofshits. But my signature dish, or rather, the dish that I'll make whenever I have to bring something, is actually a cake, the vermouth and nutmeg are quite the combination.