[Harp-L] Happy Anniversary Harp-l!

[owner-harp-l@xxxxxxxxxx]

So here we are 365 days later.  It has been a year since harp-l migrated
from our former hosting site vph to our current host, rimuhosting.com. 
Along with our provider we upgraded list programs and made the switch from
majordomo to out current Mailman. We're very happy with the new host.
Having root access along with a stable platform and excellent support has
changed everything.  The list is ever so much easier to manage using
Mailman.

For the lifers on the list, some of you may remember that harp-l has
missing archives that were housed on a hard drive that wasn't originally
in our posession.  These were the archives from the former garply.com
host.  Michael Polesky actually paid money for the hard drive so it
physically belonged to us.  Using information provided by Bobbie Giordano
I was able to track down the person at the compny garply had become, Net
Results, who knew where our drive was.  Eventually I was able to get him
to ship us our drive.  It arrived very badly pakaged shipped by parcel
post.  It turns out it was a Micropolis model 1991,  FULL height drive. 
The thing's a boat anchor.  20 pounds or so.  After watching carfully for
a number of months I had determined it was not going to make a run for the
door and I decided it was safe to try and access the information.  This
required buying a cable, add another 3 months to the wait.  I finally got
correct cabling and fired the drive up, it spun up and would seek.  About
15 minutes into this process the drive stopped making noise.  Either I
shorted a board or it just gsve up.  I really don't know for sure.

The search was on, find someone who could work on Micropolis 1991 drives. 
I found a company in the bay area that used to do all the warranty work
for Micropolis when they were still in business.  Eventually I shipped
them the drive, 4 months went by before I actually got it in a box but hey
it got there.  Once the drive arrived they were able to get it to spin up
again but found that there were read errors and that given the current
state of the drive our information is not retreivable without an attempted
data recovery.  Estimated costs for this service?  $1200.  More than
likely the drive was damaged in its initial journey from Birmingham
Alabama to me.  Again it was very poorly packaged and heavy.  The data
recovery process has no guarantees.  They might open the drive and find
the disk surfaces so damaged that they would be unreadable no matter what.
 It is likely that some if not most of the information is retreivable but
what if our archives are not on the disk.  I have no way of knowing if
this is really the harp-l drive or if it wasn't overwritten before it got
to me.  It gets worse, say I went for data recovery, ok what os is on the
disk?  I think it's HP unix but I'm not sure and I certainly don't know
the rev number.  What disk controller was this drive connected to?  No way
of knowing currently.  What are the file names we're looking for?  Again I
have no idea.  There are 2 people who might know the answers to thses
questions, well 3 actually.  Rich Drinkard a guy who used to work for
Garply.  Hugh Messenger our former fearless leader now mia for over 5
years, and Jonas Karlsson the person who get harp-l afloat through the
dark days at the end of our time with garply.  So that's the state of the
missing archives.  I'm already in for $150 the evaluation fee but I know
I'm not personally willing to chip in the rest of the $1050 and I don't
expect the list to do it either especially since we lack critical
information and there's zero guarantee.

Ok if you survived the disk saga here's some lighter reading.  I'd like to
thank the harp-l members for making this list the wonderful resource it
is.  The list culture has migrated to a much more polite place in the last
several years.  Our overall membership has increased to over 1100 now and
I spend a lot less  time dealing with upset people than I used to.  Thje
restraint that people are exercising regarding political commentary is
refreshing.  I'm on several other e-mail lists, none of them is nearly as
well behaved as this one is.

This paragraph should be at the top.  In referring to harp-l the
management I use the collective we.  There actually is a collective we,
it's me and Ben  Nathanson.  Without Ben's continuing partenership I would
be unwilling to tackle the day to day running of this list. It's the
little things like not having the bounce traffic pile up in the owner's
box because two people check it many times a day.  More than that it's
being able to maintain a perspective because unlike in the past the job of
listownership isn't one of isolation.  It's a shared responsibility with
resources and abilities that far exceed my meager contributions.  Finally
my apologies for the typos, no spell checker here in the owner's box and
my typing as well as spelling skills are definitely suspect.  fjm
harp-l-listowner