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Audioguy was one of the original team who created the existing SoylentNews site. He has stayed with us since that time and has served the community as a sys-admin for over 10 years. It is no exaggeration to say that over the last year or two he has played an almost single-handed role in keeping this site working.
Audioguy has suffered a series of significant personal and medical events over the last 6 months or so. He is now about to commence ophthalmic surgery tomorrow (Wednesday) and is facing other potentially life changing medical issues in the near future. He has, quite understandably and reluctantly, been forced to stand down from his role which was effective from late last week. Unfortunately that has meant that we have lost the ability to correct the current certificates problem. Access to the Linode servers is still controlled by the existing Board and we have experienced additional problems accessing one of our servers by the usual methods. This appears to be common to many staff and has further exacerbated the current problem.
I have written an email to NCommander requesting his assistance in updating the certificates so that the site becomes fully operational again. Your patience is appreciated. What might appear to many in the community to be a relatively minor issue is, behind the scenes, a major blow to the existing team. We have other sys-admins who are ready to pick up the challenge but they do not yet have the necessary access, nor are they yet experienced in managing the beast that that is Slashd.
Returning to audioguy, I am sure that the entire community would wish to join me in thanking him for a decade of support to the site, and to wish him well for the upcoming surgery. He remains one of this community and evidence of his past contributions can be found in numerous bits of code and associated documentation. He has also, for example, been the manager of the technical wiki which has been vital to the support team for all of that period. We are indebted to him.
Good luck for the future, audioguy. Take it easy. Best wishes to you and your family.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 09 2024, @03:35AM
> I personally gave audioguy a 1 month warning, a 14 day warning and at least 2 warnings in the last week
This is one of the more exasperating things about computer technology. Why is cert renewal dependent upon not just one, but a chain of human actions? This is surely something that can be more automated, ideally completely automated. Automation of informational work is the computer's greatest strength. It often feels like the way we use computers is still pretty primitive. Just not seeing all sorts of uses, as if we're old fogeys who hitch horses to cars. We treat computers like they are cars without a reverse gear, in which the users are expected to get out and push the car whenever there is a need to back up. Also, no starter motor, have to hand crank it to start the engine. At one job I had, the boss had college students preparing images by loading them into Photoshop to do a few simple enhancements. Was taking them a week to do a hundred images. I showed them the netpbm suite of image manipulation utilities, and wrote a script to grind through a subdirectory of images. That way, could do in under an hour all the work they were tediously taking a week to do by working the human user interface of Photoshop.
> I would hope that you would do the same in a similar situation.
Quite. I am not so fanatically devoted to any cause that I would sacrifice my and my families' lives for it. I hope audioguy is doing better.