Editor's Note: Sever Backlog

[Bob Greene]

Okay, as all of you have no doubt noticed, there was a big cutback in the
response time for Sunspots starting roughly late August. In early July, I
changed jobs and have since been doing Sunspots remotely across the
Internet, additionally, I suddenly found myself in a much more time
intensive job than I had previously enjoyed - this brought about the
slower turn around times that we saw in mid-late August and early
September.  In mid September, I also was completely out of state and
non-connected for several weeks, which has put the digest into the
critical backlog it is now in.

This has resulted in a somewhat severe situation. In order to alleviate
this condition, I will be journeying back to Rice this upcoming weekend.
I plan to bring *everything* completely up to date at this time. That
means that all submissions will be processed, all add/drop requests will
be processed, and the index files for the archives will be brought up to
date.  I also would like to do a few of the outstanding things I have on
my "Sunspots todo list" including splitting up the archives big files so
that they can be retrieved by the archive-server and bringing the disk
partition files on line. 

So, by this upcoming Monday, everything should be up to date.

Now, for the bad news: I will be leaving again on Tuesday for a business
trip to the Great White North where I am fairly sure that I will be
totally unconnected again (the company I am now working for does not have
a connection to the Internet for those of you who wondered). So, this
means that you can expect another great purge during the week after I
return (22 Oct).

Thanks again for your patience, and my sincere apologies for the sad state
I've let the Digest fall into.

Bob Greene
Sunspots Moderator
RGREENE at RICECSVM.RICE.EDU