Unsent mail...

It turns out Merlin Mann, who runs 43 Folders, is a fastmail user and was also affected by the outage there. For some reason, I started to write Mann an email from my "emergency" account, to commisserate, but then, during editing, I realized I sounded more like I was whining, which I probably am, so I canceled the email.

However, as this is my LiveJournal, I thought I'd preserve the essence of my complaining, as a good whine is perfectly acceptable in a post, especially when one is itching to get one's email back:

As a fellow fastmail user, I don't know whether to laugh or cry about server4. I used to host all of my mail on a Linux box at my home office, which allowed me to check my mail from the road, but was always a pain the butt to manage (even with postfix), not to mention expensive (the ISP wanted $10 per month for a static IP, which is highway robbery, but out in the sticks where I live, it's their way or no (information super-) highway, and my experience with dyndns.org was... not satisfactory). When I found fastmail, I was pretty happy, so much so that I forwarded virtually all of my mail to my address there.

In all the hustle and bustle connected to the disk failure, however, nowhere do I see fastmail management making a point of restoring *paid* accounts first (as you might've guessed, I'm one of their upper-tier customers). I checked my account again a few minutes ago (there are some urgent emails already *there*, which I saw just before things went kerflooey but did not read) and the status page says that now that 90% of accounts have been restored, they're putting the restore on hold until their mail queues are empty.

Sorry to sound like I'm complaining to you. I'm not.

I don't know. Like you, I used to unequivocally recommend fastmail to all my professional friends. Now, I'm not as big a fan, but not because of the outage - hell, disks fail - but because of what I perceive as poor management of the situation.

Love your blog, even if I am an inveterate PC user :^).

Cheers...

Twenty-one (or so) years too late?

A couple of items on Slashdot and digg.com have piqued my interest in a 1984 kind of way.

In one story, it turns out some guy  in North Carolina, on trial for murdering his wife, had Googled the terms "neck," "snap," "break" and "hold," and had researched lake levels, water currents, boat ramps and access before reporting his wife - who turned up dead in Raleigh Lake - missing. The article states that these tidbits were among over 100 million pages of content removed from the guy's computer.

The idea, of course, is that this information strengthens the prosecution's case by showing intent and premeditation. However, this also raises in my mind an interesting question: Assuming that "100 million pages of content" report is correct, there is virtually no way that the forensics people could have examined them manually, in my opinion. (If you could skim one page in 30 seconds, it'd take you about a century to read 'em all, with no breaks.) So what criteria did they use to select what they were going to search for? How did they know to see if they guy had researched lake levels?

One answer is that the article may be mistaken, and that the information didn't come from the computer, but from Google, in response to either a request or a subpoena. This is not clear. As Slashdot asks, "Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what you've been thinking about?" Based on current trends, it seems clear the answer will be yes, although based on eBay's behavior in the past, a simple request might do the trick. More troubling is this: Will authorities be able to look for "questionable" searches before a crime has been committed?

Another alternative kicks in the second item that seems totally unrelated: An announcement from MIT that explains why so much of what passes for music these days sounds alike (although I suppose there may be a sort of chicken-and-egg relationship between music purveyors and music listeners, but I digress...). Check this out:

[Researchers] have devised a computer program that listens to a song, then predicts how humans will react to it.

The response is so specific at times that it can forecast how a single will perform on the charts and spit out a review, guessing what words will be used to describe it, from "sexy to romantic to loud and upbeat." [...]

The researchers pull data from weblogs, chat rooms and music reviews -- anywhere a song is being discussed -- and feed it into the computer, which allows the software to gauge the popularity of a certain sound.

Once all the information is tabulated, the computer can listen to an entirely new album and predict how people will respond based on what it knows about the latest reactions to the music it has already heard.

If it sounds far-fetched, consider this: the system has been predicting Billboard hits with surprising accuracy over the past several months. While people may think their musical tastes are unpredictable and whimsical, they are actually quite traceable.

So how long will it be before we arrive at a point where someone will attempt to whip all of this together in a mix that'll make The Minority Report seem like a quaint, parochial walk in the park?

Cheers...

Issues for fastmail.fm. Draft...

From the fastmail status page:

November 11th, 2005 4:29 am EST

The first user restores will be complete in around 10 hours. All users should be restored around 45 hours after that, although we’ll restore the smaller mailboxes first, such that 75% of users will have their mail restored after around 6 hours from the start of the process.

Also:

November 12th, 2005 7:22 pm EST

90% of users are now restored. We have suspended further restores briefly, in order to allow the mail queue to clear.

As of right now (just after midnight EST), my account is not restored, which presumably means I'm in that unfortunate 10%. (First LJ in January, then this... why is my data always on the wrong server?)

Fastmail has four tiers of service, from guest accounts (10 MB storage, free), to their enhanced level (2 GB storage, $40 annually, which is what I'm signed up for). Payments start at the "member" level - a one-time fee of $14.95 - and affords such users 16 MB of storage.

I may have my head up my butt, but it seems to me that, if the criteria for restoring mailboxes is size, any people at the enhanced level who use a significant portion of those 2 gigs they pay $40 a year for are... at the back of the line, behind the free users and members who've paid fastmail a whole $15 once.

Sure, part of the venom in my tone has to do with the fact that I'm upset. Part of that anger is directed inward, naturally, since I allowed myself to get complacent and didn't habitually and immediately download all mail delivered to my fastmail account. There are files that I know were mailed to me that I didn't download because I didn't think there was a need to, and which I would really, really like to have in my hot little hands before I leave for Albuquerque tomorrow.

But the greater part of my negative feelings right now has to do with the fact that I am in a small minority still cut off from my email, and that I got stuck in this group because I'm a premium fastmail customer.

Cheers...