krupap

I think change can be great if it's coupled with effective user management. On a site that people use daily, this means giving your users some advance notice, explaining major feature changes, and having a "how-to" page to show users how to use the new site. Lacking the above, there is bound to be some backlash as daily users find themselves stumbling around a site that they used to know like the back of their hand and, worse, with the very fabric of community interaction changed.

Oh man, that's rough. According to Pahalial, above, they had to restart apache so it may be worth trying again in a while when they have things sorted out more and when the blank screen frustration's worn off...a bit.

Honestly, for me it was just refreshing every time the connection crapped out. Nothing else seemed to work. I bet they're getting hammered now though so it may take longer than the hour I got away with at 11am.

The page went blank for me too after pressing "yes, I want free stuff..." but refreshing that blank page 10-20 times got me to a "congratulations" page with a SparkFun guy wearing a crown and an order email in my inbox (though my order total, which was well over $100, didn't reflect the $100 off I'm assuming it came through...but I saved the congrats page just to be sure).

It looks like I'm one of the fortunate few who managed to place an order. I had an account set up beforehand but didn't have my cart full until 10:45am or so. SparkFun was, indeed, exceedingly slow but my tactic of pressing "refresh" every minute or so seems to have paid off. I'd say it was an hour's worth of effort in total. Best of luck and keep trying!

I was a Cave Specialist/Physical Science Tech for the National Park Service for several years. I built GIS models, led cave surveys, mapped surface hydrology, and hiked up high ridges at night with night vision gear and a computer to ID bat echolocation calls. I could spend a day skiing to a backcountry air resource station to measure ambient air quality or stay in the office and draft a map. It was a perfect mix of outdoors and geek.

You can find jobs like that at http://www.usajobs.gov/.

See also Alice, a Java-based collaboration between CMU and Sun Microsystems (http://www.alice.org).

Excellent message - the safe path is the truly dangerous one. Challenge leads to growth and growth staves off the true dangers of passivity and stagnation that bog us in the deepest of physical and intellectual mires.