by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

When I woke up Tuesday morning and checked my email, I knew something was wrong.

I finish producing Lokkal's newsletters late at night (Saturdays, Mondays and Thursdays) and schedule them to be sent out. Then, the next morning, right after washing my face, I check my main email account (events@sanmiguelevents.com) to see that everything went right, that the newsletter has indeed been sent, with a copy arriving safe and sound in my inbox, and so hopefully yours.

Publishing, as I do it, is a highly-detailed process with many, many pieces needing to be woven together. When I finish late at night, I sometimes forget to cross a "t" or dot an "i" or mistake "pm" for "am" on the send time. Regarding late-night thought processes, my homeopathic mentor, Ben Hole, MD (head of radiology at Mount Diablo Hospital before I met him) would tell patients, "You can call me whenever you like. But if you call at 3am, you'd better be careful about the advice I give you."

Publishing digitally usually gives me a chance to go back and change "the advice I give," correcting my mistakes, so I like to check bright and early. When I did three days ago on Tuesday morning, the newsletter was not in my inbox. I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea how wrong things were.

I will spare you most of the technical details of the grueling three-day odyssey that followed, the time it took to set things right, but a quick overview might be of interest. If it's not to you, then just skip (or don't pay too much attention to) the gray boxes below.

(I'm sure that there were other, better ways of achieving the same result, but) a consequence of keeping Bizland as an intermediary was that I got to maintain my main email account events@sanmiguelevents.com. Until Tuesday morning, I used this email account as a virtual office, not only for communication, but as an archive of important (and potentially important) files and such (things that probably should have been on the Cloud).

With Bizland's email service being far less robust than, say, Gmail or Hotmail, I have had problems with my email in the past. So Tuesday morning I got in touch with their technical support via chat and after 10-20 minutes on hold was assured that the "mx record" had been reset and that in 2-3 hours all would be well.

In 2-3 hours when all was not well, I called technical support and was assured, again after 10-20 minutes on hold, that some other record had now been corrected and in six hours, after the change had had time to spread (propagate) across the web, my email would be back in the pink.

I have plenty to do while on hold or while waiting for changes to propagate across the web, but, as those six hours expired, I noticed that my website was beginning to malfunction: images were not appearing on some pages; whole pages were not showing up.

Chatting again with technical support online, I was told two things which were obviously mutually incompatible: 1- my email service would return; 2- I no longer had a hosting plan with Bizland. When, pointing out the incongruity, I asked how my email could return if I were no longer a client of Bizland, the techie replied, "That's a good question."

It was already 10pm. I spent the next 3-4 hours saving what I could of my email account, being pretty sure that when I connected GoDaddy directly to AWS, and bypassed Bizland completely, events@sanmiguelevents.com would disappear, entirely, forever. I sent over a hundred emails with the subject line, "use xxxx@gmail.com please, this one does not work." I went to the email folders associated with the account and sorted through over 1000 emails, forwarding over a hundred of those to myself at xxxx@gmail.com, and downloading the content from others to my computer. It was like having an opportunity to save things from an office that you know will burn down.

Sometime after 1am, I pulled the plug. Logging into GoDaddy, and getting into a live chat with one of their technical representatives, after a bit of cajoling, and with me personally changing some preliminary settings, things that he lacked authority to change himself, he repointed the IP address of www.lokkal.com to AWS, something that I lacked the ability to do myself. Then, I went to bed.

In the morning, the website was back online (except for mobile/phone) and my email account events@sanmiguelevents.com was completely gone. That day, Wednesday, and the next, yesterday, Thursday, were spent doing a lot of housekeeping (or "office-keeping") online and producing two special newsletters for clients. Finally, Thursday morning, working with my Slovakian programmer (a reclusive genius, currently resident on the Canary Islands with his girlfriend, dogs, chickens and goats) mobile was retored and everything got back to a new, improved normal.

It wasn't until yesterday, Thursday afternoon that I started working on today's Friday newsletter. Normally, that takes me two 10- or 12-hour days of work, often ending, as I mentioned above, in the wee hours. Necessity being a mother (-f*****r), yesterday, I severely streamlined my work process and got the newsletter all ready to go in just nine hours. The strange thing is that few will notice my streamlining, and fewer still will be inconvenienced by it. The stranger thing is that I didn't take greater advantage of this time-saving method earlier.

The newsletter done (and scheduled to send) by 9pm, it was a very happy conclusion to a very difficult few days. And this morning, when I woke up and checked, the newsletter was sitting pretty in the inbox of xxxx@gmail.com.

This week's adventure brings to mind two lessons from my teachers:

Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, noted in his then scandalous (for the depth of kabbalah it revealed) book, the Tanya, that when one wrestler is about to lose, he exerts all his remaining might. That is, things get worse before they get better. My struggle this week has already ushered in two great betterments. One is cutting the production time of my Friday newsletter from 24 hours to 8 hours. The second is discovering that, as much as he might like to practice his English with me, my programmer much better understands directions written in Spanish. Either one of these insights, all by itself, is worth the wrestling I've been through this week.

The second lesson comes from one of my teachers of Chinese medicine. He said that the feng shui (the chi or energy) of a house is very much affected by the condition of its closets. A disordered closet negatively impacts the vibrations of the living space, however immaculate, on the other side of its door.

The backend (technology) of my website is now robust (and getting stronger). I have better communication with my programmer. The "closets" of my email account, the "filing cabinets" of my online office, are now ship-shaped. The sky is the limit.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, public internet, building community, strengthening the local economy. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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