There’s a bit in the Odyssey where Odysseus describes his escape from Polyphemus. Odysseus has given his name as Noman, so when Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, and the other Cyclops ask him how it happened, all Polyphemus can say is, "Noman did this to me!"

This past weekend I was suddenly unable to save new entries, and one of my previous posts was missing. Before I threw up my hands and re-installed Movable Type, I spent some time poking their handy dandy support forum, where I found a description of my very problem along with this post from a helpful soul:

The DB corruption was caused when MT tried to save a new entry and, halfway through rebuilding the DB, went over the disk quota. Now, my account wasn't over the disk quota - not even close. But MT doesn't save as me - as a CGI script, it saves as "nobody."

That's right: "nobody" was over quota. My ISP promptly doubled nobody's quota, I reinstalled MT, re-imported my files (which, thankfully, I'd mostly been able to export when things started going awry), and the problems disappeared.

My ISP - Drizzle - also increased the quota for user nobody, and then went above and beyond by restoring my directory from a backup tape. No re-install, no re-import. Hooray for Drizzle!

Also hooray for E, who spent a couple of hours noodling around in the CGI script, trying to turn nobody into somebody.