Oh, to be without Internet access in Hawaii…

Last week I had a scheduled outage for our website that was set to last a total of five minutes. Obviously, I hate scheduling those kinds of outages as normally I can make them transparent to my coworkers and our customers, but on occasion there’s no way around them.

Mid way through minute number one, I got an iChat from Don, our CEO, noting that our web site was down. Normally, that’d be expected, he’s always on our web site when I break something… you know how it goes… but, he’s in Hawaii!

Sure, that means he’s more than a couple hours behind us and bound to be online when I’m doing updates/repairs/breaking-things. Also, just because he’s in Hawaii doesn’t mean he’s not working. I don’t know that he ever stops thinking about Small Dog. But, now here’s the clincher, I hadn’t seen him on iChat in days (he’s always online), so I figured he was sitting back and enjoying Hawaii.

But, no, he had caught me a fifth of the way through my update. How does he do that?! And how should I give him more advanced notice in the future?

Well, as it turns out, an electrician had cut through the DSL line for his apartment/bungalow/suite so he’d been offline until just then (good timing). Of course, his homepage is set to SmallDog.com, so the web site being down was the first thing he saw. He’s excused… this time!

Well, shortly thereafter he sent around the photos of what he’d been doing to keep himself busy without his Internet access. Check them out!

It looks like miserable, grueling work, but someone’s got to do it, right? All that hiking, lifting the camera, trying to not get caught in the rain… oh, who am I kidding… I’d love to be in Hawaii right now! (Although if I was, there might be more than the occasional five minute outage.)

Atleast he’s taking gorgeous pictures! We may get a little envious at time, but we still wish him the best of times down there… Join me in wishing Don lots of fun!

He’ll be back soon enough and then it’ll be Spring and Summer in Vermont, something I wouldn’t miss for the world.