Philadelphia & New York Online Deadline Extended

Well, the folks at 1&1 ("The World's Biggest Web Host" indeed) promise 99.9% "server up time." I think the 3 hours our website spent offline this afternoon blows that statistic out of the water. Murphy's Law says that the server would go down on the day of the New York application deadline.

But we're back in business as of this evening, and it looks as if most folks have gotten back on the website tonight - the data is coming in pretty steadily. Nevertheless, if you're one of those who got booted off on Friday afternoon, you'll now have an extra day. We'll accept online applications that are posted by midnight on October 7.

When I talked to tech support this afternoon (from a noisy Starbucks on 31st and 7th in New York, but that's another story*), they told me it was a "power supply problem." Wonder if that means that someone unplugged it by accident... My colleague prefers to believe the server was overwhelmed by a deluge of data from rabid, enthusiastic opera singers.

We've had a few technical challenges with our interactive application, but none were insurmountable. (So far... We still have a week and a half to go before the final deadline, so I shouldn't get cocky.) We've had about 250 people apply online to date, and all of the data is safe and sound. A few glitches with resume/headshot uploads, but we've been encouraging folks to email them as attachments if there are any problems. It's a trial run, and there are certainly things that we will tweak before next year, but the early word is that it's truly been worth it. And, from the comments and messages we've received, many in the singer community appreciate the opportunity to apply digitally.

I'll spend the weekend plugged into the first 75 audio CDs and reviewing the applications for the Philadelphia and New York sites. I'll be back here with some first impressions as soon as I can.

(*I was on a quick trip to New York today for a meeting about our next opera commission. Stay tuned.)