Blogger was out of service for a few days there; the few posts below accumulated and waited to be published. Here’s Ev’s explanation of what was going on:

A perplexing bug

came up Thursday, and I spent literally all night trying to fix it. I was scheduled to leave town on Friday

afternoon for my grandfather’s funeral. I skipped my first flight, and finally took the last one out that would

get me there, only after thinking I’d fixed the Blogger problem.

When I got to my destination, I found out that I hadn’t, so I spent as much time as I could — over very

lacking connectivity — working on it the next day or so, thinking I had alleviated it at least.

The fixes where short-lived, so I got on an earlier-than-scheduled flight home yesterday, but ended up

getting stuck in stand-by hell for 12 hours, unable to get online.

I finally figured out the problem when I got home late last night. It was a database driver I had installed that

had a connection limit they didn’t tell me about. So I’m waiting for the new driver from the company now

and hoping I haven’t permanently betrayed your confidence.

A number of users of blogger.com did some very spoiled complaining about the dysfunction, if you ask me. While I was inconvenienced like the rest (or more so; see last paragraph below), I am of the same mind with those who posted to Blogger’s discussion boards suggesting people quit whining, appreciate Ev for the singlehanded job he does for free to keep the service running, and examine why they’re feeling so godawful entitled. No, Ev, you haven’t betrayed my confidence; in fact, affirmed it!

Thank you to the readers who responded to my query about my surprised observation that my daily hits jumped up last week from the usual 300-400/day to around 900, clueing me into the Wired article below and the fact that FmH was a “Blog of Note” on May 7th.

Just when three times as many people as usual are checking out FmH, I had the kind of a week (writing a lecture to a short deadline, and then Blogger giving out for several days) that greatly attenuated the quality and quantity of the postings here and is probably leaving any new readers scratching their heads about why all the fuss over FmH. Win some and lose some, I guess…