Mikey, of Mad Mikey's Blog, suffered a serious stroke on Thursday night and has been hospitalised. He has undergone surgery to stop the bleeding, but the situation is still uncertain.

Da Goddess is in touch with Mikey's family and will pass on any messages you wish to send.

We will be shutting down in one hour (about 7AM GMT) to move to the new servers. While we are shut down, you will not be able to post comments on any of the mu.nu sites.

Do not panic!

Make sure you have the following supplies at hand:

12 sheets of 1/4 inch plywood, at least 3' by 4'
6 gallons of water
At least one dozen batteries in each of the common sizes
String
Sticky tape
Wire
Tinned food such as beans; at least three tins per person per day

Use the sticky tape and string to construct a cubby house (or "fort") out of the plywood. The tins of beans can be used to defend your fort. Either throw them at people who approach, or, in close combat, ding them on the head.

For entertainment you can try touching the batteries to your tongue. Wire them in sequence and parallel and see what difference it makes!

For extra value, spill the water on the carpet and blame it on the dog.

MuNu will be moving to its new home this coming Saturday, the 12th of November. I'm not sure the exact time just yet, but since the process will take four to six hours (if everything goes smoothly) I'm not sure the exact time matters that much.

Blogs should be readable through most of that time, though all updates - posts, comments and trackbacks - will be disabled. Forums will be moved first, as they are much smaller and easier to move than the blogs. (About 500MB vs. more than 15GB.) Due to DNS issues, though, even the forums will likely be down or inaccessible for a couple of hours.

When all is done, we will be running on a much more powerful platform, with completely a up-to-date operating system and the latest databases and libraries and stuff. We'll still be stuck on Movable Type 2.6, alas. I have some potential news there, but we'll go into that after the move.

The two new MuNuServers, Kei and Yuri, are almost here. There was a slight mix-up with the operating system (the 32-bit version of CentOS was installed instead of the 64-bit version), and the clustering is waiting on parts... Well, a crossover cable, to be exact.

One bonus: They ran out of 160GB drives, so we got a couple of 200GB drives instead.

It will take a couple of weeks for me to configure and test everything, and then we'll move everything across. This should result in a shinier, happier, more responsive munu for everyone.

Polling in the Small Dead Blogs Awards has closed for 2005.

And in the categories Best Whistleblower Blog, Best Hard News Blog, and Best Canadian Blog the winner is... Angry in the Great White North. Congrats!

I'll also point out that fellow T.O.-an Debbye is back from hiatus and blogging up a storm.

Roll up! Roll up! The Carnival of the Munuvians is open for business!

I'm still de-borifying the templates, but the 2nd Inaugural Carnival of the Munuvians will go live Friday October 28th. And will (touch wood) re-appear ever Friday thereafter.

The Carnival of the Munuvians is a weekly roundup of the best posts from the feverish genius of the collected Munuvian bloggers.

You're a MuNu blogger and want to be a part of the festivities? Just send a link to your best recent post (for the inaugural Carnival, any time in October is good) to carnival -at- mu.nu. Got two great posts and can't choose? Send 'em both.

If you have a hot post and you'd like to spread the word, send an email to features -at- mu.nu, and our features editor* will include it in the daily roundup (or if it's really hot, give it its own space on the front page).

Questions? Send those to questions -at- carnival.mu.nu, or post them right here.

You can see an example of a feature item right here, on the front page of mu.nu itself. Yes, your own posts can get this sort of attention! Dozens Hundreds of readers every day!

Join in! Pixy says so!

* Me.

Without all those tiresome letters in between!

I've put up a torrent of my collection of anime opening and closing sequences here.

The tracker page shows you the list of files (82 in all, 1,830 MB) and details of the number of people currently uploading and downloading.

If you don't have a BitTorrent client you can click on the Easy Download link, which will first download a small program and then get the files for you.

Or you can download one of these fine programs:

BitTorrent (Windows, MacOS X, and Linux/Unix)
Azureus (Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and any other platform with a Java runtime)
BitTornado (Windows, MacOS X, Linux)
BitComet (Windows only)

I use Azureus myself, but any of these will work. BitTorrent, Azureus, and BitTornado are open source.

This has been a test of the Carnival of the Munuvians Feature Articles system.

I tried this once before, but it burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.

Well, not this time! This time, we fight!

Um, think I have my movies crossed there. Anyway, watch this space for Carnival-y goodness.

(The clever bit that I have managed this time that I didn't have last time is that it no longer depends on RSS feeds duplicating posts from the Carnival blog to the forum/portal system. Now it just goes splat and appears by magic. There are problems with that too, but less, on the whole than with the RSS version.)

Carnival of the Munuvians is a new feature showcasing the best of the many mu.nu bloggers. There are two parts this: A weekly showcase of posts, similar to the other carnivals floating about on the blogosphere, and special features highlighting a single exceptional post.

This will be a regular feature here on the front page of mu.nu - assuming that I have my RSS feeds working properly. We shall see.

Roy Hallums was working as a civilian contractor in Iraq when he was abducted on November 1st, 2004. He is still being held hostage.

Rusty Shackleford of the Jawa Report has an exclusive interview with Roy's family: The Damned of the West.