“Everything was accomplished,..What else could I do?” Michael Phelps said.

There’s so much profound meaning in this sentence. It shows us that this outstanding swimmer had above all an outstanding vision of what he should achieve. The rest was all a matter of perseverance!

Michael Phelps Biography

Michael Phelps Super Human Or Has A Customized Body For Swimming?

Michael Phelps:

- Takes 12,000 calories daily, which is approximately 6 times than that of the average adult
- Has a tall body of 6-4 with a wingspan of nearly 80 inches (great for water)
- Has double-jointed elbows, knees and ankles (allowing him to try different positions which others can’t)
- Has shoe size of 14 (Surprisingly, these act like giant flippers in water)
- Has ability to relax, focus and block out the pain all at once

I just noticed the following message on Entrecard’s main page:

There was a fire at our datacenter resulting in the failure of some of our systems, our database server appears to be offline still, we’re working on it and we’re really sorry about the issues at this time. more information arriving shortly.

Update: The outage is pretty serious, you can read more about the datacenter fire at ThePlanet forums. They’ve got teams of people there and they’re working through the night. We have no ETA at this time, very sorry.

I rushed on ThePlanet forums and the matter sounds a bit serious, here’s some quote of the recent news:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m., a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down.

We are working with the fire department, with our facilities staff on site, to assess the situation.

To keep you updated, we will send messages every 15 minutes in Orbit and here in our forum.

From Doug Erwin:
This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.

We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.

This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.

We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.

There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.

I am sorry that this accident has occurred and I apologize for the impact.

More teams from The Planet are coming along with more contractors from key vendors for electrical and facilities to help get H1 online. At this time, DNS infrastructure continues to propagate. ServerCommand servers are installed, but the teams are making sure all networking is intact and ready. In the meantime, please call our support lines for any issues. Additional support techs are available.

At this time, we do not have an updated Estimated Time to repair. Please continue following this thread for updates.

—–
Urvish Vashi
Director, Product Management
The Planet

For more news, visit the ThePlanet forums

Let’s hope everything gets back to normal soon and Entrecard comes back.

UPDATED: Entrecard is now back :)

Last night (24th May 2008), Dima Bilan, representing Russia, won the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest.

The ranking of the 25 countries:

1) Russia with 272 points
2) Ukraine with 230 points
3) Greece with 218 points
4) Armenia with 199 points
5) Norway with 182 points
6) Serbia with 218 points
7) Turkey with 218 points
Azerbaijan with 132 points
9) Israel with 124 points
10) Bosnia Herzegovina with 110 points
11) Georgia with 83 points
12) Latvia with 83 points
13) Portugal with 69 points
14) Iceland with 64 points
15) Denmark with 60 points
16) Spain with 55 points
17) Albania with 55 points
18) Sweden with 83 points
19) France with 47 points
20) Romania with 45 points
21) Croatia with 44 points
22) Finland with 35 points
23) Germany with 14 points
24) Poland with 14 points
25) United Kingdom with 14 points

Was There An Apparent Biasness Towards United Kingdom?

United Kingdom finished last with only a miserable 14 points. UK was represented by Andy Abraham with his song Even If - which was surely worth more than 14 points.
It is said that some degree of “bias voting” were made, with many former Soviet states awarding Russia the maximum 12 points during the voting process.

“I think it’s tremendously disappointing from the point of view of the United Kingdom,” said Sir Terry Wogan (commentator on the competition for the BBC since the 1970s)
“Andy Abraham gave, I think, the performance of his life with a song that certainly deserved far more points than it got… When you look at the points that Spain got, that Bosnia-Herzegovina got – some really ridiculous songs“, he added.

Anyway, here’s a clip of the song which won Russia the award:

Eurovision Song Contest 2008 - Russia Wins!