Sys-admins throughout Puget Sound had their long weekend disrupted on Friday when a fire at Fisher Plaza shut down power to their mission-critical data center. Thousands of websites were knocked offline, including the transaction processor Authorize.Net, the heavily-visited Microsoft Bing Travel, and AdHost, themselves a shared hosting provider for thousands more business and personal websites (here’s a partial list of affected websites).

As it happens, this wasn’t the first such outage at Fisher Plaza, where data service was also interrupted last year due to a similar electrical fire. Michael Young, CTO of real estate listings site Redfin, deserves kudos for recognizing the point of failure and instituting a disaster recovery plan. As he explained to TechFlash:

We were pretty embarrassed last June when Adhost had a similar electrical fire and took our site down for 8 hours (well into our core business hours) with brown-outs a day or two after that had us scrambling. ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me’ resonated in our brains.

So by October 2008, we basically instituted a disaster avoidance plan where we had redundant-everything for our mission-critical databases, servers and networks in separate buildings.

When the problem happened last night, our beepers went off, we saw what looked like a major outage in one building, and were able to switch to the redundant systems.

Well done, Redfin!

This also seems like a good opportunity to put in a plug for Dreamhost, my own current hosting provider, with whom I’ve never had any day-long (or even half-day-long) outages, fire-related or otherwise. And remember: wherever you do your web hosting, a disaster recovery plan is a necessity, not a luxury.

The new Wordnik website is wonderful—about ten trillion times more useful than any of the other online dictionaries, none of which I will ever be using again.

If you haven’t looked up a word with Wordnik yet, its clean, slick design offers a given word’s:

• Dictionary definitions, from several sources
• Multiple real-world examples from historical texts
• Related words (thesaurus)
• Etymologies, also from several sources
• Audio pronunciation

Pretty useful so far, but those are also fairly standard dictionary features. Then Wordnik gets awesome:

• Real-time word use from Twitter
• Very cool bubble-graph of the word’s usage over time (going back to 1800!)
• Images from Flickr tagged with the word
• Anagrams
• Scrabble point score
• Community-uploaded word pronunciations

I’m also a big fan of their human-readable URLs. Here’s an example, from one of my favorite words:

http://www.wordnik.com/words/cacophony

The only downside is that if the word is somewhat rare—like abiogenesis, which I had to look up recently—then many of the features are truncated or gone. Another missing feature is a spelling suggestion tool; if you misspell a word, it doesn’t correct you or even give you an error message. In fairness to both criticisms, the project is clearly labeled as a beta.

Finally… yes, Wordnik contains dirty words, and yes, looking them up is every bit as juvenile and fun as it’s been since fifth grade.

This week’s tasty tidbits from the business and technology front, as well as other recommended links:

• How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood — Scientific American has some fascinating details that can help boost your productivity. I was expecting vague platitudes about feng shui, but was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the recommendations.
• James Cameron’s Sci-fi Film Is Turning the Heads of Fans — Cameron’s new 3D film, Avatar, sounds like it could revolutionize the movie industry… and be really fun to watch.
• 6 Networking Mistakes And How to Avoid Them — That’s networking in the social sense, not the hardware sense. Harvard Business offers solid tips for both introverts as well as seasoned pros.
• Top ten reasons managers become great — Project management and public speaking guru Scott Berkun offers some practical advice for managers.
• The best ergonomic keyboards on the market — Slate takes a look at a wind range of ergonomic keyboards and reviews the results.
• 10 Usability Nightmares You Should Be Aware Of — Most of these examples are like nails on a digital chalkboard. Designers, please, PLEASE avoid them!
• Maybe you shouldn’t buy that — After browsing this hilarious site it’s hard to deny that we’re living in a new Gilded Age.