The new email system failed at six this morning for a total of nine hours. It will happen again. Two of our offices on the west coast could not do business and now the business side of our company (where the muscle resides) is aware that all is not well in IT dell. It's a little scary, actually. About 15% of our people have been converted over to the failed new system. I do not want to think what nine hours without email might have meant to the company if we'd been fully converted.

My cousin and his son dropped by today on their way from Los Angeles to Seattle and we had lunch at Kinkaid's restaurant down in Jack London Square. They were serving Copper River salmon. Alaska Copper River salmon is available for a very short, usually three week period, when commercial fisherman, who are bent on destroying the species, are allowed to cast their evil nets and haul them in. They're really good. So we took our time and ate Copper River salmon and thought "shit", if the season is really only three weeks long, they must be rapidly declining, so we'd better eat while the eating is good. So we did. Yum! The email disaster we'd experienced in the morning didn't directly affect me, so I had all the time I needed to visit and show the family how we handle dying species here in Oakland.

So, an exciting day. The email system blew up pretty much as predicted and for the reasons we'd predicted (we are so clever and wonderful!). Better to see it now, I think, than later. There are reasons, some similar to the ones that brought it down today, some that have to do with the hardware, that will bring it all down again and again, but who knows? Maybe someone up there with half a brain will say: "Hey! Kids! This thing doesn't work! We need to do some rethinking!" They fire us little people when we say things like that. Or write them down.