In case you were trying to access any of the Thoughts Media sites (Pocket PC Thoughts, Digital Media Thoughts, Zune Thoughts, Smartphone Thoughts) or Mobility Site this weekend, you most likely noticed that you couldn’t. Evidently there was an explosion at The Planet’s Houston data center. According to a letter sent to The Planet’s customers, “three walls of the electrical equipment room on the first floor blew several feet from their original position, and the underground cabling that powers the first floor of H1 was destroyed.” But that’s not all.

Read the letter* I’ve posted below, and tell me if the idea of this type of catastrophe doesn’t totally freak you out. Of course there are a lot of smaller hosting companies who resell Planet server space; I think this may turn out to be an even larger problem than initially thought. :-/

I hope that the 9000 servers affected are soon up again, and I hope a bare minimum of data (if any) was lost; what a mess.

Dear Valued Customers:

As previously committed, I would like to provide an update on where we stand following yesterday’s explosion in our H1 data center. First, I would like to extend my sincere thanks for your patience during the past 28 hours.  We are acutely aware that uptime is critical to your business, and you have my personal commitment that The Planet team will continue to work around the clock to restore your service.

As you have read, we have begun receiving some of the equipment required to start repairs.  While no customer servers have been damaged or lost, we have new information that damage to our H1 data center is worse than initially expected. Three walls of the electrical equipment room on the first floor blew several feet from their original position, and the underground cabling that powers the first floor of H1 was destroyed.

Continue Reading

As you may recall, last October Chris Leckness was one of the attendees as the LA press event for Sandisk’s launch of the 8GB MicroSD card. One of the fab bits of SWAG attendees received was the Nokia N95, which he used for a bit and then basically relegated to the used gadget pile all of us reviewers have. He even tried getting his wife to use it, but no dice - she likes her CrackBerry better. It’s okay, though, because this story has a happy ending…

Last night, I was cleaning up around my office and I came across the box for the N95 and thought that it was a shame that such an expensive, powerful phone was just sitting in the graveyard waiting for a photo op. So, I decided to give it to one of you!

There are three things you have to do to qualify to win, and none of them are overly complicated. Get over to Chris’ site, give it your best shot, and tell him we sent you. If you win, come back and let us know. Because as you know, I love happy endings…

Link: Win a Nokia N95 from Mobility Site