TGO David

Yep! Picked up by the PO on Wednesday. Folks should have them arriving today, tomorrow, Monday!

PS: That brown one contains five (5) of the 20oz tumblers. You know who you are!

Postage has been printed, the USPS has been paid, and I am scheduling a pick-up of the boxes as soon as their site lets me do so. This was an interesting experience, for sure. I hope everyone likes their tumblers when they arrive!

Wow, very nice gesture on someone's part and GREATLY appreciated!

Yeah, it was eye-opening as the pile of boxes kept growing. The good news is these all show something like 1-3 day shipping depending on what ZIP code it is going to. If we are able to get the postage labels all printed out today, it's possible they will be picked up by Tuesday if the USPS lets us schedule it that soon.

Whew... next step, printing postage! My middle daughter helped sort, tape and pack so ya'll are fortunate beneficiaries of forced "child" (she's 20) labor.

Boxing up tumblers today and printing out postage! 40-something boxes of them going to the post office this week.

We only make a small amount of disk space available for hosting photos, mainly for the classifieds ads sections. For most things we recommend everyone, our vendors included, host their photos on one of the big photo hosting services like SmugMug, Photobucket, etc. Here's an older how-to. The basics are still the same:

Their small batch is very, very good. A bit hot, but if you find it too strong you can always open it up a little with an ice cube or splash of water. Willet Family Estate Rye is amazing.

Since some folks have repeatedly proven that they cannot handle the responsibility of NOT posting profanity in picture form, we have deleted the "Funny Pics" thread.

Ah... good ole R2-FU.

Yeah, I'd say we ordered a few of these...

One leg of the robot you're building to take over the world?

There are days lately I'd like to have my dial-up modems back! This... This was "the business" right here, just before I went broadband back in 1997.

Thanks folks. I am optimistic for the moment -- the work I did overnight to address what I feared were software issues may have put us back in the green for the immediate term. A server upgrade is inevitable, it seems, but I am weighing my options. Doubling the monthly hosting cost is still a hard pill to swallow.

Thanks. Yeah, I am a member over there also. The new password requirements they put into place are absurd.

As do I. Which is why we have been looking at this as potentially a DoS attack. That type of attack can look like legitimate web traffic.

We've been seeing a lot of "Guest" browsing. That's folks who aren't logged in or aren't registered as members, reading content. This is different than Google, Yahoo, Bing or other search engine spiders combing the threads. Those show up entirely differently. No, these are actual people reading threads anonymously. In order to preserve resources for folks who are actually members and who are logged in, I have set the forum to show thread titles but not thread content to guests. This won't affect search engines like Google, but it will affect the lookie-loo's who are putting a load on the server without contributing anything in return. More to come. The hosting company just hit me with a recommendation that would almost double my monthly expenses with them. I'm sure it would be a bad-ass server, but the cost is hard to swallow.

UPDATE: Tumblers are due to be delivered to me today! Tracking number shows them as out for delivery. With luck I will have these boxed up and going out to folks by Saturday! (Got to get my kids to help me box all of these up)

As you may be aware, the site was offline for the past 12 hours so that we could perform some work to address the slowness issues that were affecting the site. I am not convinced that we are out of the woods just yet. This problem may reoccur. At present, I cannot tell you whether the problem was the result of something wrong with a software upgrade, or with the forum database, or merely a lack of sufficient resources to meet demand, or something more sinister. We have dealt with Denial of Service attacks in the past and this looked very similar to them in quite a few ways, however our hosting provider did not confirm that anything like a DoS was happening. I am speaking with the hosting provider today to evaluate the cost and benefit of adding more resources to our server. Anything we add will carry a monthly cost. It is times like this that I am extremely appreciative of the Benefactor members who support the site financially, and of the Vendors who advertise with us. It is times like this that I also urge you to support the shops who support TGO and spend your money elsewhere when considering the shops that don't. "Vote" with your wallets and ask shops that don't support TGO to do so. Let them know that this community is important to you and that it should be important to them also. It takes money to run TGO. So... one last thought: If the site starts slowing down again today, please don't pile traffic onto the problem just to post and tell us "The site is slow". We'll know it is before you do, most likely. Posting about it just adds more burden to the server and doesn't help me get it fixed any faster. While I appreciate the frustration you guys are feeling as members of TGO trying to access the site you enjoy so much, I am feeling a lot of frustration behind the scenes while I am working and trying to stabilize things. Sorry for the problems, folks.

Actually the forum only sucks on Wednesdays. Every other day, it's pretty good.

The software auto-saves when you are composing a public post but doesn't appear to do that for a private message. I can suggest it to the forum software authors as a possible future feature. Unfortunately no matter what time of day or night we choose to make updates, someone is going to be using the forum. There's never a "good time".

Your browser may have cached an old version of the page. Any time someone says they logged out, logged back in, refreshed, etc. and something magically reappeared, that speaks to items cached on their side of the connection.

Spotify is better anyway.

I have historical proof that this is not a true statement.