Wednesday, November 2, 2005

A One-Click Answer



I've been on 24-hour duty every other day for the past 6 days. Sometimes I get to sleep, sometimes I don't. I leave the clinic around 8 in the morning and arrive at home at around 9. What's the first thing I do when I get home - change clothes? Eat breakfast? Bathe? Sleep? - not even close. I go straight to the computer and wait for the dial-up modems to establish a link, then I blog. Once in a while, my ISP is down, sometimes I can't get my mail, Blogger is down (panic!), Haloscan is inaccessible - my mood changes and I'm pissed off!

I agree that interacting on the Net is very important but exactly how important should it be? Minor hiccups by Net services, software, instant messengers, and email services are to be expected but why do I feel that I will miss out on something big if I can't log in with just 'one click'? Or even worse - Why do I sometimes feel that the world will miss out on something big if I can't log in?

I came across this post by chance and was brought back to reality


One of the most irritating things to me is the expectation of six-nines service (e.g. 99.9999% uptime) from things which are free (or $1/mo). Haloscan, Blogger, LibraryThing, you name it. This is the internet--things happen. Also, people _sleep_ for chrissakes, or at least they sometimes try to. You can't have it both ways (free and always available) and you know what? Even if you pay for something, you're not going to get six-nines service. You'll be lucky if you get two nines. Hell, you'll likely get a nine and an eight, or no guarantee at all. Or maybe a nine and a seven. Maybe a six.

My point is simply this: it is naive to think that everything is always on, even if you are. Blogger sucks because it went down for twenty minutes and I couldn't post about what I did today, or the world is going to end because for several hours no one could leave comments to my post, for the love of god who cares. Who cares? So we're inconvenienced because our blogging service burped. TypePad burps too. So does Yahoo. So does Amazon, and eBay, and every other entity online. Every single one. While we're inconvenienced, there are engineers running around trying to fix whatever the f*ck got broken because every nine that drops off the counter means less income for their company and probably they'll be out of a job. The Blogger folks--and there aren't that many of them relative to the size of the company, as Google headcount != Blogger headcount--don't think they don't personally feel the weight of the entire internet on them when Blogger goes down unexpectedly for even a few minutes. It's one of the most f*ck*ng stressful feelings ever to watch your app crash to a halt and the collective hate of ten people, let alone 10 million people, focuses itself squarely between your eyes.

...Go take a walk or something and come back later and the whole matrix will all be back in place and we can resume our whatever-insignificant-thing-we-all-blog-about blogging and commenting.[Irritating @ No Fancy Name]

I just got home from a 24-hour duty and I'm here still in duty clothes, with an empty stomach, eyelids drooping, and haggard looking, blogging - because you guys might miss out on something big if I don't! Hahaha!
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