There has been a black cloud looming over the Deken household for nearly two weeks now. We’ve been balancing on a knife edge waiting for news from DriveSavers to see if Diary-X could be salvaged.

Since DriveSavers boasts and brags that they are 99.xx% effective at recovery, I was much less concerned than Stephen. I figured it would just piss people off to lose two weeks of journalling time, and we’d be done with it. Movin’ on.

Nothing could have prepared me for the phone call I received from Stephen yesterday afternoon, telling me that DriveSavers couldn’t recover a damned thing. It was like a massive kick to the gut. I hung up the phone with him and went out into the lobby of my office and laid down on the floor. My secretary laughed until she saw I was near tears. Then she tossed a Now and Later at me and asked what was wrong.

I told her. She was quiet. Then she just said, “Man, that sucks.”

I told her I knew Stephen so well that the next time I saw him he was going to say he was shutting the whole thing down.

Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. I would have laughed at him, but I saw he was actually serious. This worried me.

Diary-X is his baby, his creation. I’m sometimes a Diary-X widow, when he holes up in his office and works on it for hours. He had grand plans for it, wanting to continuously take it “to the next level.” We even fought over it, because I wanted him to take the family “to the next level” too. I thought it wasn’t bad the way it was. But he would point to the multiple posts in the forums, where users would outline what else they’d like to see on D-X. The unfortunate part about that was that the only programmer for the operation is my husband.

He was always tweaking, expanding. I couldn’t imagine why. If people are using the service, why would they expect anything other than what he had given them?

Even this morning, he is convinced that if he brought it back, he would have to continue modifying, upgrading, changing it to be “better, stronger, faster.” Sure, we have the technology, but we don’t have the time.

He points to the new baby, due in August. (It’s a girl, by the way.) How will he have time then? My argument to him this morning has been that he should just bring it back, and then let it alone. People seemed to enjoy it the way it was. Why continue to change it?

He says it’s a web program and that changes are expected. It should evolve. I say, if people want fancy-schmancy “friend” links or communities or whatever, let someone else jump into the open source and code it, or maybe they are just on the wrong journalling service.

Last night I tried to support his decision to shut it down. I figured we’d wake up to more hate mail this morning than to supportive mail. But I was wrong. People seemed to like Diary-X. The way it was - not the way he thought it should be a year down the road.

Can he be a husband, a father, an employee, etc, and still run the site? That’s the question sitting out there right now. I don’t know that I made a big dent in arguing for it to be reopened. But maybe this Phoenix can fly once again.

Sad and tired,
michelle