The Eventing Nation IT room
Today we dealt with the second major server problem on Eventing Nation in less than a month. In the end, like US team meltdowns, occasional server problems seem to be an inevitable part of the Eventing Nation experience. I could write about exactly why they happen, but the bottom line is that we still haven’t found a perfect solution to lots of people coming to the site all at once. Fortunately, we narrowly avoided a server crash today and escaped with just some very slow load times for some readers. Today’s issue was partly my fault for posting too many videos on the site over the last couple of days, which enhanced the bandwidth strain. In the future, if you experience problems with the site, feel free to email [email protected] and we will start sacrificing one Chinchilla every hour on the hour to the website gods until the problem resolves. Now, some quick notes:
–Our friends in the dressage world might have stumbled upon a brilliant idea. Next weekend, the Region 1 Dressage Championships in North Carolina will be hosting a simultaneous golf tournament just five minutes away from the competition for bored dressage dads “folks who accompany their competitors to the show.” No, I am not making this up, click here for more information and thanks to BC for the link. As an aside, I feel particularly bad for pure dressage dads because they don’t have moments of intense worrying to break up the boredom like eventing dads.
–In sad news, a car collided with a horse on Tuesday in an Oregon highway, killing both a 30 year old passenger of the car and the horse. Police are investigating the circumstances of the crash and how the horse got onto the highway, but they mentioned potential criminal charges could be filed. According to the report, there have been 88 Oregon traffic crashes involving horses between 2005 and 2009, two of which were fatal for humans. Frankly, that’s an incredibly high number to me and it seems like horse owners and vehicle drivers could do a lot to reduce those numbers.
–The USEA convention will have a seminar on “Smart Business Practices for Eventing Professionals.” My suggestion for making money for aspiring eventing professional would be to take up curling instead. There are a few US riders who make good money, but the rest do it because they love it which is a better reason than anything else for choosing a career.
–In the category of shameless plugs/celebrations, I am pleased to report that a saddle we posted Tuesday morning on Sport Horse Nation sold within hours of posting the classified. We developed SHN after receiving a lot of email requests from readers for a classifieds site exclusively for eventers, and we enjoy providing a forum for selling horses and other eventing-related items at a great value. Rumor has it that we will be posting a help-wanted position for a top eventing barn later this week so stay tuned for that.
–Check out photos of Boyd and Remi at Pau
That’s all for now. I’m leaving Eventing Nation in Annie’s capable hands for the rest of the day, so, unless Hamish challenges Dave to a duel or the EN server has another problem, I’ll see everyone tonight. I leave you with a photo from The Royal–Patricia at Ecogold took a picture of Lex, one of our favorite Canadian readers, who reportedly checks EN over 15 times a day.
Go eventing.
