Wow. On New Year’s Eve, one of the biggest party and event nights of the year, the Evite website goes down for planned maintenance. What a terrible plan!

So either they used this “planned maintenance” page to make it look like they didn’t mess up or they actually planned to have the website down on NYE - a much worse offense. How embarrassing.

Incidentally, earlier this month we used pingg as our online invitation solution for our going-away party. We chose it because of its nice, clean interface and minimal advertising space. It worked great and I’d recommend it. Also, they don’t seem to be down right now.

Screenshot from 7:20pm MST:

and at 7:40pm MST:

and here’s evite.com at 7:50pm MST:

And evite.com is still down at 8pm MST, 40 minutes after I first tried to access the site. Who knows how long it was down prior to 7:20pm.

420 Science is experiencing a bit of “planned maintenance” of its own. We shut down operations on December 23rd and began packing for the move to Austin.

We’re now loaded into four 28′ trailers and the trucks are on their way to Austin. We leave on Saturday, arrive Sunday and begin unloading and setting up on Monday.

We hope to begin shipping again on Friday, January 9th. Fortunately, our customers have been understanding and supportive of our move to Austin. Perhaps the free shipping we’re offering while we’re down has something to do with that.

I’ve got a party to go to and fortunately I don’t need any vital info from evite. I hope everyone has a happy new year and enjoys their NYE celebrations.

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The Veho USB Microscope is finally here. When we first brought the 420 Scope to market a year and a half ago, we knew we wanted to also offer a USB microscope to our customers. But we wanted to take our time and do it right. So many of the digital scopes available were more like children’s toys than scientific instruments - and we wanted ours to be different.

2 Megapixel Resolution

Size Matters. Our New Veho Scope captures images at 1600 x 1200 pixels. As far as we know, this is the only USB microscope under $100 to offer that high of resolution.

Make Incredible Videos

Wow. This is the perfect tool to create incredible videos to show your friends and post on YouTube.

Easy to Use

This microscope is easy to use and the software allows you to adjust settings to get the best picture. Change the brightness, contrast, color and more through a menu that makes sense.

So, those are the reasons I’m proud we’re offering the new Veho Microscope. It’s been in the works for a while and I’m happy we’re able to provide it before Christmas. I know it’ll make a great gift for a lot of people.

I spent the afternoon adding the USB Scope to our website. It was basically a bare-minimum implementation so people could start ordering them. We still need to get it into our Flash intro on the website (Gary’s job) and re-work the layout of some pages to give our new scope the attention it deserves.

Veho VMS-001: USB Microscope from 420 Science

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