Comments on How We Got This Week's Issue to the Printer

Woohoo! My boy Brian G. gets a call out on SLOG.

so are you chuckleheads going to fire your sys admin for not creating a real redundancy plan or what?

All this horseshit is totally preventable with the most basic redundancy plan.

Ok.

it's like a DVD extras disc but without Peter Bogdanovich's irritating commentary.

Wear Helmets.

why does this amuse me so?

Hecht works for The Stranger and has plastic grocery bags in his home? Shame!!! Shame!!! Shame!!!

Huh, no pics of A. Birch Steen throwing a tantrum?

"van usually used to distribute the paper" and I thought it was distributed by bicycle, boy, do i feel like a fool

"So we found a bunch of plastic grocery store bags" Could any snarky comment from me really add anything to that?

@2 I can't see an alt weekly having off-site fail over or a generator in the basement.

So, what you're saying is that we can pretty much expect the entirety of this week's edition to appear in next year's "regrets" issue?

The color of the hard hat, not the car, tells you everything: White hats are bosses. Yellow hats are workers.

For example, I have a white CL car, but a yellow hat. I am absolutely nobody's boss. In fact, I'm pretty much the bottom of the barrel, hierarchy-wise.

But I'm glad your power got put back up. They really should add that part of the hill to the downtown network.

And this is special because?????

I love it -- great story. Thanks for all your hard work!

Come on, you guys are a professional operation now. At least spring for a generator.

It's a heartwarming tale of a spirited group of newspaper people working against time and the odds to get that issueout on time!

Naomi Watts is unspeakably nuanced in her starring role as real-life Managing Editor Bethany Jean Clement!

Wonder at Edward Norton in the role of his career as publisher Tim Keck!

And in a role originally offered to Heath Ledger, Zach Ephron dons a kooky tie and is transformed into Wunderkind editor Christopher Frizelle.

Look for Robert Downey Junior in a surprise cameo as sex-columnist Dan Savage!

@16, that is called a "straight to video" release. Then off to the $2.99 discount bin at Blockbuster Video.

you still have a print product?

I must say, Stranger heads, for all the crap I give you... this was a truly impressive salvage job in what, for many, would've been an impossible situation. Excellent work.

Kick-ass story, and a great off-the-cuff recovery. Moving the whole production to the living room -- genius.

It's totally unrealistic to expect a small office like that to have a generator backup, but it's NOT unrealistic to at least have some UPS/battery backups so you can shut down, or even work for a half hour. They're not that expensive. I really, really hope your servers are on one.

Fnarf @20: We have lots of battery backups, but not every machine is on one. The servers of course are. They give us enough time to shut them down gently, but not much more. Once SCL pulled the plug completely, we were sunk, as the batteries had already been strained in the first outage, and powering up several power-hungry Mac Pros is more than those batteries can do.

If we had moved all of our batteries around the office, we might have been able to get a few machines up for long enough to move some files around. It was easier to just move the computers to a reliable power source.

Way to go, and you still managed to slog election night to boot. The two dailies, with all their redundant IT glitter, covered nothing on their websites last night except for raw results.

Good thing for gas-powered private vehicles and plastic bags.

great story... thanks!

Reminds me of the days of my highschool paper/yearbook crew! Great job to everyone, and it all sounded like fun too! Can't wait to get my hands on the new Stranger tonight!

You know, if you used a real OS like Linux or Mac, you would have finished rendering and saved the file a heck of a lot quicker.

Just sayin.

Hey would it be unrealistic to have bicycle messengers on standby to power up the office with Gilligan style bike generators?

Come on Stranger. Get your sh#t together.

Great job and story.

You guys proofread?

looks like some of your bikers need helmets.

outside of that, that's a great feat you pulled off. nice work!

You shouldn't have bothered. I didn't even feel like reading it.

Wasn't this an episode of Lou Grant about 30 years ago?

Chris Kraft: "This could be the worst disaster NASA's ever experienced."

Gene Kranz: "With all due respect, sir, I believe this is going to be our finest hour."

- NASA Flight Directors, "Apollo 13"

@25 - Look at the pictures more closely.

Zak Efron does NOT have an enormous whatchamahoosits...he's not fit to play the part in any sense of the word.

more importantly... THE LIQUER STORE WAS CLOSED!!!

Unionize. That'll show Tim and Dan who has the power NEXT TIME.

@25 - .

Um yeah, @25, we're all Mac here. But even Macs don't work without power.

I have the only PC in the oo-o-ooffice, 'cept for Tone, but his is just for testing. :P

@33, Christopher Frizelle has an enormous whatchamahoosits?!?! Is that what you're implying here, Mr. Strangeways?

Way, way, way too much detail here. Is all of that bold type so necessary? I'm sure it was exciting for the Stranger gang, but not that captivating for anybody else, sorry.

My power went out a few months ago, and I was on deadline too. Do you want the 1200 word version? I know you'll dig it. And I have several awesome photos of me and my dead computer that I could show you. See what I mean?

40 - Yes!! Link to your blog.

Good work all of you. What a damned stressful time.

Is it just me or is the Stranger's print edition a bit small these days?

Just a few years ago Savage would run a weekly comparison of the Stranger and the Weekly's print editions. Of course the Stranger was always the larger of the two. These days they're both very small.

Sad to see the dead tree versions of newspapers wither away...

Nice! Boo to the people who read it and then bitched about reading it--some of us love a behind-the-scenes story.

Out of curiosity, what's the story with having individual sections saved to personal hard drives as well as the shared drive?

I mean, obviously it saved some asses in this particular situation, but it seems like a recipe for shit getting out-of-sync and bad-redundant really quickly; if I started saving work-in-progress to my personal hard drive instead of the shared drive, I'm fairly sure my coworkers and boss would drown me.

Very impressive. Hi to Shena from Burlington, VT!

It was an exiting adventure in publishing, and we all kicked ass.