This week, Maomao finds a perfectly good reason to indulge her taste for strong alcohol.

(been a long week; I need a Grea)

Outlook: poor

The global Microsoft outage impacting uncountable millions of people sounds very much like a self-inflicted DDOS. Every customer device was attempting to reconnect and download email, without any kind of backoff, so as soon as they brought something up, it was pounded into submission by client traffic.

Experienced network engineers know how to deal with that before it overwhelms your recovery capacity. Microsoft laid them all off and replaced them with cheap H1Bs and offshore contractors, to save money.

I’m guessing they’re going to lose all that saved money today, and a whole lot more.

(okay, maybe two Greas)

Amazon: logistics is job 10

1. Placed order for two in-stock items, shipped directly from Amazon warehouses with next-day shipping.

2. Items immediately switch to 2-day shipping.

3. 12 hours later, one item is delayed by 1 day.

4. 12 hours later, email arrives, insisting the other item is delayed indefinitely. I can either wait an entire month for it to ship, or cancel now, reorder, and have it tomorrow.

5. 6 hours later, first item is no longer delayed a day, and will arrive only one day late instead of two.

Loving the customer experience.

In other news, they’ve replaced the recommendations page with a new design that does not allow you to say “I’m not interested in this squishy toy for autistic toddlers who chug Red Bull”. Now it’s just a bunch of random add-to-cart buttons, and a dialog option at the top where you can type “here’s what I want you to show me more of”.

Why it thinks I need four more espresso machines, five more WDT devices, three more coffee scales, another RDT sprayer, three more tamping stations, four more Nintendo Switch 2’s, and eleven more pasta drying racks, I can’t imagine.

The six ebooks that don’t come out until Spring are consistent with the old “recommendations” behavior, at least.

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