Radio Tonight

In case you haven't heard enough of me this weekend, I'll be a guest on the Karel show tonight on KGO AM 810 in San Francisco. 9:30-10p Pacific.

MacWorld Expo

MacWorld Expo is coming up January 15-18 and we're planning to do several shows from the convention hall including MacBreak Weekly and TWiT. Save the date.

CES is the week before and I'm happy to say I will be skipping that monster of a show for the third year in a row. I was thinking of doing the radio show from there until I found out that for the first time CES would not be open on the weekend. Just as well. It's an almost impossible conference to cover on-site (and I'll be getting back from a family trip to Egypt the day before anyway).

Kati and the Kids are OK!

Just posted on CNET at 2:17P Pacific...

The wife and daughters of missing CNET senior editor James Kim have been found alive and airlifted to a local hospital, authorities announced at a press conference in Merlin, Ore., Monday afternoon.

James Kim left the car on snowshoes two days ago to seek help and has not been found. The search for him continues.

According to the official speaking at the news conference, the conditions of Kati, Penelope and Sabine are not yet known. More details are expected at a press conference at 5 p.m. PST.

No word on James - but we're praying for him!

Missing TechTVer

I just received this disturbing news. If any of you knows anything please help...

CNET editor and former Fresh Gear contributor and Lab analyst James Kim has been missing since Saturday. ANY word, especially from people in the Oregon area is appreciated. The information is all below from the official investigation by the SFPD.

Missing Family Includes: James, Kati, Penelope (age 4.5) and Sabine (6 months). Last name is Kim

Overview: The Kim Family left San Francisco on November 17th on a road trip to the Pacific Northwest. They had Thanksgiving in Seattle with family and then drove to Portland. They were last seen by their friends in Portland whom they had brunch with on Saturday, November 25. According to their friends, their plans were to drive out to the town of Gold Beach on the Oregon Coast and then make their way back to San Francisco. James was expected back at work on Tuesday, November 28th. When no one had heard from him by Wednesday morning employees at the Kims' two stores and his colleagues at CNET began to make phone calls to his family and friends to inquire of his whereabouts. Presently, the SFPD is investigating the case.

The family was last heard from at around 5:45 PM on Saturday. A hotel clerk at the Tu Tu Tun lodge in Gold Beach, Oregon took a call from James. He said he was about five hours away. The hotel clerk said she would leave the keys out for them as the lobby would be closed after 10. The keys were still in the same place the next morning. The clerk believes James referred to being near Salem, Oregon at the time. They were driving a 2005 silver Saab station wagon with California personalized plates of “DOESF�.

More details and pictures of the family are available on CNET's Crave Blog.

If you know anything about James' whereabouts, you can contact the SFPD by calling 415-558-5508 during normal business hours and 415-553-1071 after hours.  

Friday the 13th Sever Woes

I'm no triskaidekaphobe but I'm starting to be a believer. A hard drive on one of my servers died this morning. As a result leo.am, leoville.tv, and Leoville Town Square are down. So are all the podcast feeds (they live on leoville.tv but I'm moving them to cachefly as soon as I can).

The good news is that I have complete and up-to-date backups, so no data has been lost. The bad news is that my hosting company, The Planet, (nudge, nudge) is taking its own sweet time fixing the problem. (So far it's been six hours without a response. I will be looking for a new hosting company.)

TWiT.tv, the TWiT forums, and leoville.com are unaffected. I'm hoping all the other sites will be up and running soon.

The podcast feeds are also locked - you can read them but the filesystem is read-only so I can't add to them. There are new episodes of the Daily Giz Wiz, Windows Weekly, FLOSS Weekly, and The Laporte Report in the queue. I'll post them on TWiT.tv and update the feeds as soon as I am able.

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE: The Planet finally got a new drive in and the OS loaded a mere 12 hours after the initial failure. I'm out of town (fortunately the TravelLodge has good Internet access) so it's a little tricky getting everything restored, especially since WHM won't let me in. Once they fix this CPanel license problem I'll get things back up. Everything should be back sometime today. I hope.

I've received some good recommendations for hosting, but I'm still shopping around. I'm looking for three dedicated servers - we currently spend $1000/month for three dual Xeon boxes with 2TB/month each and 100Mbps pipes. If some high reliability, service oriented hosting company would like to be the new home of TWiT please email me. Thanks!