I was kind of busy yesterday.

When summer lasts just three days you have to make the most of it, so I spent most of the day weeding, hacking down trees and trying to clear half a ton of weed out of the lake.

Anyhows, I switched on my laptop quite late in the evening and was inundated with emails.  They were all from a site I use and they all said the same thing –

“Your site is down!  Rambles is not responding.  Get off your backside and fix it” or words to that effect.

There is a bit of a fad for monitors these days.  People pay silly money for yokes they wear on there wrists that tell them that their heart is beating, thereby proving they are silly people.  I don’t need a wrist band to tell me my heart is beating, because if my heart stops, I imaging I will be beyond caring and doubtless in no fit state to look at a monitor.  Nor do I need anything that tells me how many steps I have taken.  If I want to get from A to B then I will use as many steps as is required for the journey, no more, no less, and the actual number is irrelevant.  Unless you are a total neurotic of course.

I do however use monitors for my web sites.  I have yokes that monitor all sorts of things about them, and a couple of those monitors alert me if a site goes arse over tit.   That is what happened last night.

So I fired up Rambles.  There it was in all its lonely glory.  I flicked through a couple of pages and got bored.  I went into the site that does the main monitoring for me, and sure enough it was bitching about Rambles, claiming it had been down for a couple of hours.

I went into another site that monitors traffic.  That was perfectly normal.  People were still visiting the site [presumably by accident thinking they had found some decent porn or something] and they seemed to be happy.  Some lingered for a while and some flicked through a few pages – a difficult feat if the site is down?

The mails had stopped at this stage.  Presumably the monitor had decided I wasn’t worth the effort as I wasn’t fixing a site that wasn’t broken.

I checked the monitoring site this morning.

It was happy.  “Everything is fine”, it said.  “All your sites are working perfectly”.

It did however add that Rambles had been out of action for 7 hours and 18 minutes.

If my wrist watch told me my heart had stopped beating for 7 hours and 18 minutes I might get a little worried.

But then who trusts monitors?