On June 3rd, 1997, my Internet Service Provider (ISP) Synet Inc. (synet.net) defaulted on their loans from Homewood Bank of Downer's Grove, IL. The same day, the local county Sheriffs arrived and repossessed all of the computer equipment (amongst other things owned by the company). The next week, the owner of the company, Dhiren Rana, filed for Chapter 11, and had an injunction placed on the repossessed equipment. Effectively this kept both sides from obtaining the computer equipment until after the filing of the bankruptcy sheltering request.

In the meantime, Homewood Bank received calls from numerous former customers of Synet Inc who were trying to obtain their lost web sites. I was among those customers. As I soon found out, not only did Homewood Bank want to return the web data to their former customers of Synet Inc, but they were filing to have the injunction overthrown. They would then turn over the computer equipment to a data salvage company, who would return the data to the proper owners at their expense. Unfortunately due to the speed of the U.S. legal system, this has yet to happen.

While all of this was going on, I was frantically hunting high and low for any and all backed up data at work. Due to my implicit trust of Synet Inc, I didn't have a complete backup of any of my data more recent than 18 months in age. Luckily, I had some of the content archived on my work account, and I dove through old backup tapes to recover it. Other unlikely recoveries came from faithful readers who had saved old articles, web pages devoted to bands who I had written about in the past, and even from Permission magazine who saved some of my articles that I submitted to them for publication. I would like to formally extend my thanks to each and every one of you who graciously donated any article, regardless of age, size, or format so that I could eventually get the data back on-line.

Now that I have regular data funneling in, on June 17th, I filed with the InterNIC to have my domain name (sonic-boom.com) transferred to my new ISP, aracnet.com. For any of you who have dealt with the InterNIC before, they move even slower than the legal system, even though they advertise a three day turn around. After 2 weeks of not hearing from them, I called four times, after the circuits were busy for three of the calls. I sat on hold for ten minutes where I finally talked to an operator, and she finally updated the DNS record for my domain. A quick e-mail to my local systems administrator, and 36 hours of propagation time later, and Sonic-Boom was back on-line on Sunday July 1st, 1997. After two days of frenzied work, a large volume of content, with the sole exception of the actual magazine was on-line as well. I had managed to recover from a total loss of everything, to a functioning environment is a single month.

So I'd like to formally announce the triumphant return of Sonic-Boom with Volume II, Issue 1.0. A quick peek around the issue will reveal that it contains, in it's entirety, the May 1997 (Issue 4.6) issue which was fully recovered, along with five more interviews, and forty odd album reviews. Also included is a guest editorial by my Copy Editor Cheyne Cryonax, and a few odds and ends.

You will also notice a mild redesign, and the lack of most of the older archives. The only older content is approximately thirty interviews. I do have around one hundred older reviews that will appear on-line as time allows, but right now I am focusing on bringing the newest and most up to date content first. With luck, all of my old data will be returned to me by Homewood Bank, so I want to avoid wasting significant amounts of time reworking older material. However, I am still taking contributions, so if you happened to save any of my reviews or interviews from a previous visit, please send them my way and I'll make sure they get back on-line. You might also notice a few broken links or two as well as a few missing content areas. Rest assured, they are all being worked on and will return at my earliest possible convenience.

So please take some time and poke around. Please send my any comments you might have about the new design or other changes. As always, remember Sonic-Boom is first and foremost about the music, so keep your egos checked at the door if you read something you don't agree with. Remember we're only human and we are allowed to think differently than anyone else.

Jester