Wednesday, April 15
Itäkeskus bus station, 19:10
Today was a nightmare. I had the CMS group all day, working on their social sites. To do this they needed access to their sites on HostMonster, and on Monday HostMonster had cheerfully informed me that they had deactivated the account for violating their terms of service.
I set the group off on an offline design exercise at the start of the day, pointing out that they habitually leapt into designing the site too quickly, and they could benefit from fate forcing them to spend longer on the thinking and sketching phase. I then contacted HostMonster’s live chat. I had a ninety minute chat with Donnie and at the end the sites were re-activated. I made an announcement, there was a brief cheer, and the group prepared to begin testing their ideas on their sites.
Five minutes later I got an email from HostMonster telling me that they had deactivated the account for violating their terms of service. After waiting the obligatory twenty minutes I began talking with Jovanna from HostMonster. We eventually determined that one of the student sites had a plugin that was making far too many calls to the server and thus slowing down other sites on the same server. I deleted that site. Jovanna then told me that the TOS department wanted me to optimize all eighteen databases, before they would retest the site. Two hours into this chat, while I was almost finished optimizing the databases, the chat closed itself automatically “due to user inactivity”.
It took thirty five minutes before I was able to contact another representative. She decided that the call should be taken by the TOS department itself and put me through to Matthew. I listed everything that I had done and he then said that he would do a thorough test. He found a second site where a plugin was causing issues, so I went into that site and deleted all the plugins. He then retested and declared the site healthy. At 15:10 the students’ sites went back online and I went to get a sandwich.
At 17:00, when the class finished, I went downstairs to the party commemorating Arcada’s cable channel DINA which is being permanently switched off at 18:00. Lots of people from the past had promised to attend, but only Raisa turned up, with her new baby Marco. Since I hadn’t seen her for years, we spent a happy time chatting about what she had been doing and about what her partner Markus, who is a WordPress designer, was up to.
Lars was there too. I had not seen him for months and so I brought him up to date on my adventures in getting a doctorate, and he explained how the ceremonial systems work. Maija and Sonja, two ex-students who had been central to much of DINA’s production work, also arrived and joined in the conversations. I finally learned, after almost ten years, that DINA stood for “digitally inventive narrative appliances”, and that Lars, how invented the phrase, had never intended it to be used as the name of the television channel.
At 18:00 Mirko showed a movie he had compiled of Dina’s history, and then filmed Raisa ceremonially switching DINA off.
Now I am on my way home. It is getting cold and I am waiting for the 93.
Later I will have a shower and Naa will arive home from an evening in the centre with Roosa.