perfidy

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel it is important that all the Ministry's readers, ministers, and minions be aware of the events of the past two weeks.

A few of you may have noticed that the Ministry of Minor Perfidy's website went down last week for several days. This was most regrettable.

The outage was the unfortunate result of a negotiation gone bad between myself, an interdimensional supercomputer which calls itself Sheridan, and one of the more testy Ancient Outer Evils. One thing you need to understand about interdimensional supercomputers is that the concept of latency takes on a whole new meaning. Here on Earth, we are accustomed to network latencies on the order of milliseconds, gaps of time that are nearly imperceptible even at their worst. But when the computer is both sentient and relying on logic processors, language interpretation software packages, and RAM caches residing in a cool half-dozen parallel universes, latencies can range from the normal milliseconds to minutes at a time. The net result - get it? Net result? - is that sometimes the right hand literally does not know what the left hand is doing. And this time, as the right hand was agreeing with me and this particularly testy Ancient Outer Evil on the main points of our proposed cross-temporal profit sharing scheme, the left hand was simultaneously insulting the same Evil's mother and trying to impregnate one of our receptionist.

Long story short, I zigged, Evil zagged, and in the ensuing chaos our server room was on the receiving end of some accidental gunplay. I would have thought that a few extra air holes would merely have aided in cooling our massively overclocked machines, but nooooooo, both scrutator and snoogums (ah, stalwart servers both!) went to that great gig in the sky.

It took many thousands of sprite-hours of work and the regrettable deaths of millions of code-gnomes to reconstruct the trillions of bits of data the Ministry has collected over the years. Hard work, backbreaking work, frequently fatal work (ah! brave code-gnomes!), but necessary work if we are to bring you the content, wisdom, and dubious counsel you have grown to depend on (or at least tolerate).

Many thanks to Ministers Ross and Patton for their yeoman's work in repairing the site, to Buckethead for spearheading the entire venture, and to GeekLethal for locking, loading, and figuring out a way to rescue me from Sheridan's hordes of gorgeous yet deadly fembots.