From our wonderful IT people at Neolinear:

deathstar is currently experiencing some problems due to the high influx of requests from the timecard bots that poeple are using. As long as people continue to use these bots/scripts, the system will be very slow.

At the moment, the timecard system is down completely. I will post another messages when the situation is resolved.

We wrote the bots because the system was agonizingly slow to begin with, about 30 seconds to perform a transaction. Each working day requires at least three transactions (punch in, punch out, charge time). Thus, using the IT-provided web interface takes about 30 minutes to fill out the timecard.

The sad thing is we can't even blame it on a bad homebrew database implementation -- the backend is Postgres which, though not a terrific performer, is used in a lot of large-scale projects. Their web interface is just that craptastic.