Our deepest apologies for making your Friday go by that much slower. If you're in New York, today is a really nice day to take a long break outside somewhere.

There have been a number of other tech complaints — the login button not showing up in the menu toolbar, other browers not playing nicely with the new comments, images not showing up in our RSS feeds — and I'm assured that new servers are being purchased, code rewritten and other tech things that I do not understand are being done to iron things out. It might take the weekend to get fixed, so I appreciate you bearing with us.

But aside from all that, for those of you who have been able to get into comments, what do you think of the first 24 hours of the new hierarchy? So far, we've been pleasantly surprised by the absence of an uprising aside from the general griping that any redesign seems to foster.

The biggest source of complaints seems to be the folks who are unhappy with the whole notion of hierarchy as instituting a caste system. I don't want to refute that notion entirely — exclusivity has its own mystique — but I think some clarification is needed here. The point of dividing the comments into two sections isn't entirely about creating a clique of cool kids. Rather, it's about drawing out the comments that are going to be interesting to our many, many readers who don't make a habit of jumping into comments without scaring them off with a lot of the commenter games that don't make much sense outside Gawker's own commenter community.

For a long time, stars were handed out to people who commented regularly with some level of wit or insight. With the new star powers, we're changing the criteria a bit: we're looking for people to help us filter out those most brilliant comments that lots of people come to the site to read. So, instead of simply handing stars out to the people we like — we love all our commenters equally! (that's not true) — we've made the stars more about responsibilities than popularity.

For instance: if you have a star, try promoting the most worthy of the unstarred. Your name will appear right under the comment (earning you good will and who knows what else) by using your thumbs up tool. And it also means steering clear of trolls and the idiots since anything a star commenter responds to gets promoted to the featured section.

And, of course, you should know that if this sounds like too much of a chore, then Gawker still has a place for people to come and chat with their friends. Just click "Show all comments" at the bottom and comment to your heart's content. Assuming that the comments will load for you, of course.

A Washington Post story tries to paint the tech environment Obama's staffers encountered as horrifyingly archaic:

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking....

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

Guess what? Outside the Manhattan media bubble and Silicon Valley's startup cube farms, this is how most Americans work. Want a Macintosh? Sorry, IT hasn't approved it. Oh, you need to use Facebook to interact with customers? Sorry, that site's blocked — and management suspects that "social media" is a buzzword which means "getting paid to waste time chatting with friends." Want to use some new blogging service? Fill out this three-page questionnaire about the site's security practices, please.

This is not a story about digital pioneers getting cast back into the Stone Age; it's about a privileged elite learning how the rest of the country has to work. Those "six-year-old versions of Microsoft software"? That must mean Windows XP. If you haven't noticed, most people still prefer XP over Microsoft's clunky, buggy, annoying new Vista. Here's a suggestion for the Obamans: Stop whining about the tools taxpayers have paid for, and get to work learning how to cope with what your employer gives you, just like the rest of us.

(Image via Futurenow/Robert Gorell)

As always, thank you for sticking by us in these trying times.

But now the replacement laptop is working again.

For the moment.

For the next few hours, probably.

Minutes, if I'm lucky.

I suppose this means that Gawker needs to make a new capital investment and should perhaps consider selling the G5 or the bungalow in St. Bart's.

Bwa ha ha ha! Right.

So, for the record, nothing on Gawker at 10AM doesn't technically mean I'm dead, although I appreciate the concerned emails. We're getting our entire fixed asset base (my laptop) repaired tomorrow, so by Thursday or so, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled meanness.

Elizabeth Spiers