I must take a few moments and talk about my web master Steve Hurst. He is a great guy who has given many hours of his free time to the Ventriloquist Central Website and never complains.
When I met Steve four years ago he was excited to do the website with me because he always said he wanted to do a ventriloquist website but never had a reason to do so. I told him I wanted to showcase my collection and we were off and running.
Before long we were partners on this venture. I find the information and provide it to him and even though he stays more in the background he is the major force bringing all the great information to you.
I have to admit you the public never see the problems that can occur with running and keeping a website running unless you do this as a job. The Ventriloquist Central website is now huge with over ten thousand files (as of today) and believe me I am happy Steve has to maintain them rather than me.
Well a couple of weeks ago Steve had a major problem because his main hard drive along with his two of his back up drives with most of the Ventriloquist Central files crashed.
Can I tell you I got a call from a wild man!!!
Steve said he has always told all his computer customers they have to do back up for their files and even provides the service but when you work on your own computer it is always the last to get what is needed so you get the idea.
Now you know you always see in the news how the police make arrests and confiscate computers and can pull information that has been deleted. I said this to Steve and he laughed. He said sure the law enforcement agencies have all the equipment and pay for that sort of service.
Costs to pull files can run into thousands of dollars. I began to shake. How would we be able to survive if he had lost everything?
Well Steve has worked feverishly over the past week and has retrieved much of what was lost (due to what he calls his redundancy in backups on other drives, plus a few “secret” techniques he’s devised) and none of you were ever aware of anything happening behind the scenes. Even with these redundancies, he still had to recreate his “workhorse” computer, the one that controls Ventriloquist Central, which he has been doing the past two weeks.
I was so impressed with the fact that he was able to keep everything running and just wanted to give him a public shout and say thanks to my friend and partner.
Thanks again Steve for a continuing job well done.
Dan
www.ventriloquistcentral.com
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Dan Willinger is a ventriloquism enthusiast and ventriloquist figure collector. He has been collecting for over 25 years. He created the Ventriloquist Central Collection. It now has over 100 ventriloquist figures and over 50 of them are Frank Marshall figures. Because of his love for the art of ventriloquism, Mr. Willinger created the website Ventriloquist Central. For more information about the website, go to: http://www.ventriloquistcentral.com
Copyright 2010 by Dan Willinger
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