I've actually destroyed a website of my own three times...once per year blogging, come to think of it...

First time was my first paid-for-by-me web space. P6 started on Blogger then moved to space donated by someone who saw some potential in what I was doing. I bought my own web space so I could control email addresses and such. I was very unfamiliar with the tools and carelessly dicking around I deleted my entire web directory. One panicked phone call to tech support got the previous night's backup restored.

Then there was the stupid deletion of the N-Net, to which the current incident bears an uncomfortable resemblance. Thinking back, there's a common factor to all three errors. Basically, I get into a real-world state that's both unpleasant and long-term enough that I lose focus and start looking for escape activities. Just random things. In this case I was going to reuse a test database when creating a new one was almost as fast...would have saved time, as it turns out.

My father's health is the big distraction. It is...difficult. And that's for me...I admit my role in this is not the most difficult.

But I do know my role. I've had practice. Had a guy report to me when I worked Wall Street operations, I think he was like 67...the company wouldn't force you out until you were 70. But he had issues that caused us to lose a bag of money several times, and we had an optional early retirement program, and I told him the truth when I said there was a limit to what I could protect him from.

He took the early retirement. He died two, maybe three weeks later.