The Search For Enlightenment

Having felt that we were almost there with the new Fraser’s website last night, I was in for a horrible shock this morning. On the drive up to Newbury, I was blissfully unaware that the live site had been all but destroyed by a re-sync I ran yesterday evening.

During Tuesday afternoon, I had inadvertently uploaded a script that had reset most of the content on the staging server. Of course, nobody was any the wiser because until the sites were synchronised, the live site remained intact. As soon as I ran the sync, all the damage was transferred over to live, and frighteningly there is no concept of an ‘undo’ command.

As soon as I looked in my inbox and saw the mails reporting the state of the site I was plunged into hell-state. Although the software partners are working on a set of backup scripts, I knew they were unfinished and that all the copy, images, menus and navigation was lost.

Fortunately, and to my huge relief, Bully had a data snapshot, albeit from February. That was the starting point for an entire day’s work, trying to cherry pick the latest elements from a whole morass of ancient code. Without the expert help of our partners, and Bully in particular, we, and by that I mean I, would have been in a very real mess. By about 5:00pm we were pretty much back where we should be. Thanks a million Bully.

So the drive from Newbury to Bristol was taken at a very leisurely pace, with a lot of chanting, while I tried to restore my life-state back to one of the higher worlds. It took a while, way past Swindon in fact, but finally my life-energies were on the rise. It’s strange how certain incidents can lower your energy, almost in an instant, but it can take a lot of chanting to get them back up again.

At least with my practice, I have a method to control them. Prior to practicing Nichiren Buddhism, I would have been in hell-state for a long time. By chanting, I raised them quite quickly, and I guess that had a good effect on both Bumble and myself as we sat and discussed the debacle over dinner. I know that I haven’t heard the last of this mistake, but at least I am in a good state to rationalise the incident, document the error and make plans to ensure that it never happens again. Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.