Unexpected server outage…

Well, the new earlier “Daylight Saving Time” change that was implemented in North America this past weekend did not, in fact, manage to save me any time. A required operating system update installed on Sunday ended up breaking almost everything else, leaving all interactive portions of Remote Central coming up with nothing but an error message.

The problem was known immediately; however since practically everything was broken the fix could not be done until late last night – basically requiring my admin to reinstall the operating system and services in person!

I apologize for the outage and thank everyone who emailed me about the issue. A few additional updates still have to be made, so there might be a few brief outages over the next few days.

Deadline extended!

Not having had anything to do with Spring Break for some years now, it completely slipped my mind that the deadline for The Great Pronto Design Contest fell squarely in the middle of one of the busiest vacation periods of the year. Whoops!

So, in consideration of everyone currently lolling in the sun on the beach – not to mention the server outage that made it rather hard to contact anyone – it only seemed appropriate that I extend the contest deadline a little bit.

You now have until midnight Pacific Time on Sunday April 8th, 2007.

So what’s this whole contest thing? Well, the rules are simple: come up with the most breathtaking, imaginative, and original remote control layout for the Philips Pronto Professional TSU9600 using the ProntoEdit Professional editing software and you could win one of three prize packages totaling over $9,000 in value – the Grand Prize is a 50” plasma television! Submit your file to Remote Central and, once the submission period is complete, we’ll begin the voting process where all Remote Central members will be given the opportunity to vote on which file is best. This contest is open to all residents of the US, Canada and Europe!

For full contest details and submission guidelines click here.