who [accidentally cut the wrong power line](http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/12/la.power.outage/index.html) and brought down Los Angeles today. Next time I have a technical bad day, I’ll think “it could be worse.”

Unfortunately, I found out today the hard way that [Dreamhost](http://www.dreamhost.com) is in California. Around 4:30 pm or so, all of the sites that I host went down. Dreamhost did a pretty good job of keeping their customers updated first through their [offsite status page](http://status.dreamhost.com/) (server in San Jose, CA…come on guys…should be in New York or Boston, not in the same state as the main server) and then on their [company blog.](http://blog.dreamhost.com/) Their support pages are still down. The web panel just came back online. I give Dreamhost some credit for concentrating on customer sites before worrying about bringing up their own site. I’m typing this in ecto now, but who knows how long it will be before I can hit the “Publish” button since Dreamhost’s MySQL servers are still offline. No MySQL, no MovableType. No MovableType, no blog entries. I want to blog about the fact that I can’t blog, but I can’t blog because I can’t blog. (Since you’re reading this, you know it did come back…10:45 pm…about 6 hours after going down…hey, better than the east coast blackout from 2 years ago, right? 😉 )

While I was offline anyway, I finally upgraded the RAM in my notebook. It’s now maxxed out at 2 GB. [ZipZoomfly](http://www.zipzoomfly.com) was selling [Crucial](http://www.crucial.com) chips for $120 a piece with free 2nd day shipping. That’s $30 off for top-of-the-line memory so it was time. It was either get in the habit of closing down applications or get more RAM. I was spending way too much time hanging out in virtual memory. Say what you want about [Dell](http://www.dell.com) laptops, they’re decently designed for the DIY’er. No digging under the keyboard to get to the RAM. It’s all accessed from underneath. 10 minutes start to finish.

So now I have two perfectly good 512MB chips here. 512MB PC2-4200. DDR2. Be the first to make a donation to [C3](http://www.c-three.org) and agree to cover the shipping costs (shouldn’t be much) and they’re yours.