I’m writing this on 12/24, and you’re almost certainly reading it on or after the morning of the 25th. Happy holidays! For those of you who received your first internet as a gift this morning, and have just now fired it up and come to see what this Creek Running North thing is you’ve heard so much about in the supermarket checkout lines, welcome! I think you will find the online world as rewarding a time-suck as the rest of us have. Gabba gabba!
One of the first things you should look at is Wampum, home of (in addition to some top-notch reporting on Native issues, autism, and politics in general) the Koufax Awards. The Koufaxes are an open-source, user-generated celebration of the best the left blog world has to offer, and nominations are opening very shortly at the new Koufax Awards site.
Mary Beth Williams and Eric Brunner-Williams and Dwight Meredith run the Koufaxes each year for free. And by “for free” I mean they spend money to do so. It’s a net loss to them. Once in a while they ask for help to defray particular expenses. One such particular expense happened a couple months ago: they decided it would be nice to have a better generator to run the Koufax servers off the grid. (MB and Eric host the servers in their house, which‘s house has wheels on it and four kids in it.) [Note update/correction quoted a couple paras down.] I mentioned that Creek Running North readers who value the Koufax Awards might consider donating to the generator fund. That suggestion was buried all the way down at the bottom of this post, and yet CRN readers sent in, according to MB, enough to buy the generator. Which eventually started working the way they expected it to. (Long story.)
Few things have touched me lately the way CRN readers’ response to that generator ask did.
If Wampum wasn’t hosting the Koufaxes, they’d be a perennial finalist in the “Deserving of Wider Recognition” category. Each year the left blogworld descends on Wampum en masse for the Koufaxes, and then after we all win (because we all do!) their readership drops again. Surges in readership are mixed blessings, as I found out this year when the entire internet decided to download a four meg PDF graphic novel I’d put together to make Michael and Amanda chuckle. When that many people check your website a few times an hour, with many of them trying to vote for people by leaving comments, it can strain the web servers something fierce. The cheaters, and they do exist, make it worse.
And thus, MB has been asking politely for the funds to replace two of their servers’ hard drives, which they suspect are not quite up to handling the predicted traffic. (There were certainly times during last year’s Koufaxen when speed at their site was akin to molasses in Bangor in February.) MB and Eric and Dwight have committed to running the Koufaxes even if they have to use their old drives, even if they start smoking like overheated Tesla Coils. (The servers. Not the bloggers. Although it is a lot of work.)
[Update: Eric, in comments, offers a clarification, 95 percent of which I understand. I quote it here for your convenience:
One minor correction. The servers are in Bangor (wampum.wabanaki.net) and Portland (koufax.wabanaki.net) Maine, and their electrical needs are met, as are their bandwidth needs, in the colo space Steve Gilbert is gracious enough to provide (in return for some technical assistance I provide him).
We provision the servers with “content” (the gorp I write, MB’s work) and manage the blog-and-drupal and their respective servers from an off-grid point in space, presently proximal to Vandenberg AFB, about 50’ from the mean high tide line, where a generator has been a blessing.
The disks will allow me to switch on three more servers, and seperate the sql from the http, and be a _lot_ calmer about playing mix-n-match with two-or-more mutually incompatible configuration requirements, on two-or-fewer actual platforms.
If we go over on the disk ask (be still my heart!) I need a terminal server to I can (finally, again) have console access to the quarter-rack, and turn one into a border router (so I can null-route all the ips the spam-bots come in on, and de-spam upstream of the http and sql servers.
being ./’d by the A list nominees and (due to the elevated link count) being targeted by the drone armies of spam-bot is a lot easier to cope with/defend against with more than two operational nodes.
]
<---
pro forma close brackets thingie. Resume original post:
And no one’s really stepping up to toss cash their way this time, perhaps because MB is embarrassed to bleg too hard. So I’m blegging here. I know a lot of you were very generous when it was time to pony up for the generator. I know there are lots of demands on your attention these days, not to mention your bank balance.
But here’s the thing: the hard drives Eric’s got his eye on cost less than half what the generator cost. I’d rather not ask again myself, but the thought of having basically no one respond to a call for funds for those hard drives, while we all know full well that people will give the Wampum folks a serious hard time if the servers go out during the nominations and voting, well… I’d like to help try to make their good deeds go unpunished this year. They could just throw up their hands and say the lack of funding signifies a lack of interest. But we all know better than that.
So thank you once again, those of you who did CRN proud by stepping up to the plate to meet that last Koufax pitch. (Yes. I did. Sorry.) If you can toss a little more cash MB’s way, or if you missed the last go ‘round, and you like the Koufax awards — if you plan to nominate a blog or a post for an award, or if you expect someone will nominate you — go to MB’s Amazon honor system page and divest yourself of a few dollars. There’s a PayPal option too, with a link from Wampum’s front page. Though some people have had problems with PayPal of late.
And if you’re tapped out but you want to help somehow and you have a blog, you might mention this there. Feel free to cut and paste.
I said this a couple months ago, and I still mean it. More than any other single online event, the Koufax Awards builds a remarkable unity and camaraderie across the left-progressive-feminist blog world. MB and Eric and Dwight have enough things to sink their cash into, and there isn’t as much positivity on our side as there ought to be. They do important work for very little recognition. Let’s help them out.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
9 comments on "Koufaxes!"Prufrock!Prufrock!Prufrock!
One minor correction. The servers are in Bangor (wampum.wabanaki.net) and Portland (koufax.wabanaki.net) Maine, and their electrical needs are met, as are their bandwidth needs, in the colo space Steve Gilbert is gracious enough to provide (in return for some technical assistance I provide him).
We provision the servers with “content” (the gorp I write, MB’s work) and manage the blog-and-drupal and their respective servers from an off-grid point in space, presently proximal to Vandenberg AFB, about 50’ from the mean high tide line, where a generator has been a blessing.
The disks will allow me to switch on three more servers, and seperate the sql from the http, and be a _lot_ calmer about playing mix-n-match with two-or-more mutually incompatible configuration requirements, on two-or-fewer actual platforms.
If we go over on the disk ask (be still my heart!) I need a terminal server to I can (finally, again) have console access to the quarter-rack, and turn one into a border router (so I can null-route all the ips the spam-bots come in on, and de-spam upstream of the http and sql servers.
being ./‘d by the A list nominees and (due to the elevated link count) being targeted by the drone armies of spam-bot is a lot easier to cope with/defend against with more than two operational nodes.
Thanks for the plug, and the spark plug! Love to Zeke too!
Merry Christmas, Zeke, Chris and the rest of your family!
I’ll do what I can to help.
done
I used the Amazon Honor System thing because Paypal doesn’t seem to have my correct information at the moment, but not notwithstanding the problems linked to with Paypal, is Paypal better for transferring donations? Amazon takes a cut of 15% plus 15 cents, apparently.
Rich, I just checked my Amazon Honor System account, and the FAQ notes a 2.9% + $.30 per transaction fee. My only complaint is that Amazon limits contributions to $50 per transaction, whereas PayPal is unlimited.
I still think PayPal sucks, for the most part. Their behavior in our generator fiasco was probably criminal (we’ll see, when the California AG gets back to us) and then their attempts to cover it up by offering to buy the generator from us (which would include us knowingly committed a felony) are almost comic. But they have a near monopoly on the online-cash racket, so it’s play the game or starve.
Thanks again for everything, Chris. Have a nice walk with Zeke today.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Years!
-Walter & Family
Sugar Mountain Farm
in Vermont
Sorry for the misinformation; when I googled it I got a press release with the 15/15 information from 2001, which was evidently changed.