High maintenance

The internet police caught up with us this week, finally noticing that NCPR had more than 50% more audio online than the site was rated for. They locked us out of putting up any new content—such as the next day's news—until we had brought the site back within its budget. Eeek! So I spent a chunk of the weekend and Monday pulling off old audio and stashing it until we could negotiate a bigger dedicated server. This comes at a time when we are changing over our pledge and newsletter services to another vendor, and making other structural changes at ncpr.org. It brought to mind how issues of scale come eventually to bear on any situation. We continue to reach out for the new, the innovative, but as we build larger, more and more energy is required simply to maintain what has already been done. Trees grow beyond their ability to transport water upward, family homes ramble out over new crawl spaces until it becomes a full-time job just to keep it all from falling back down. An ant can lift twenty times its own weight, but if you scale one up to human-size, it can't even hold itself up. Fortunately, we drink a lot of coffee around here, and look forward to stunted growth.