It finally happened. The blog site crashed under the pressure of all the last minute posts. I couldn’t even post to this site at noon, when the deadline was, let alone the class site itself. It seems there were several other classes with deadlines today, and so..well,…  Stressed emails started raining in late evening and kept up all morning.

I extended the deadline to midnight when the system came back on stream early afternoon. That seemed to keep the peace, but I wonder if I should have been so lenient. The Federal Government does not allow the failure of their websites as a excuse for missing a grant deadline (and this can mean people have to wait up to a year to resubmit). This is a great motivator for submitting earlier than the 59th minute of the 11th hour. So I told the class – for Blog Periods 2 and 3, no extensions no matter what. If the US Government can govern like that, so can I.