No Escape</head> </head> <body style="font-family: serif; font-size: 14pt;">  <div style="margin: 20px;"> <div style="text-align: center;"><img src="closed-sign.jpg" alt="Sorry, we're closed" /></div> <p>If you're reading this, that means <code>electric-escape.net</code> has been shut down -- again.</p> <p>When the site got derailed for a week back in December, I thought it was a one-time anomaly, an inadvertent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdotted" target="_blank">slashdotting</a> by some overenthusiastic <i>Star Wars</i> geeks. A little dusting, some code tweaks, and a new host, and everything should be hunky-dory again, right?</p> <p>Wrong.</p> <p>After getting booted by <em>another</em> web hosting service for "exceeding shared server capacity", it seems my little rest stop on the information superhighway was a victim of its own success. While we didn't get a lot of visitors, we <em>did</em> get eyeballs into a lot of community websites. So when a sufficiently-amusing post popped up, it was enough to start a cascade of "Hey, guys, check this out!" that left the server looking like a toy store after Christmas.</p> <p>Unfortunately, I currently don't have the time nor the inclination to get my hosting issues resolved, and paying $100/month for a more robust package was out of the question.</p> <p>So I decided to simply close shop and hunker down ...at least for now.</p> <p>To be honest, I don't know if <code>electric-escape.net</code> will be back. I'm egotistical enough to enjoy having my own place on the web that's not a me-too page in the sea of Facebooks and Bloggers, but also cheap enough that I don't want to pay commercial prices just to weather an occassional tsunami of visitors. At least this hiatus gives me a chance to poke around the code, make upgrades, or maybe rebuild it completely with the latest technological goodies...</p> <p>Keep watching this space for future announcements, and remember to always look on the bright side of life.</p> <br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="Chinese-New-Year-in-prison.jpg" alt="" /></div> <p style="margin: 3em 0 0 30em;">--R.J.<br />February 20, 2009</p> </div> </body> </html>