Joel the Librarian

Usually the sun breaks my east-facing window blockade, raising my room temperature to “tropical” status and waking me up around 8am. The sun was merciful this morning, though, and I didn’t wake up until much later. Fully rested, I perform my normal morning routine of switching on the computer and having a glass of orange juice. I open up the browser and… nothing. Since I use Yahoo! email, I have Yahoo! as my home page and nothing came up. I tried a few other pages and they seem to be working fine, but no Yahoo!. That’s fine. Not the end of the world. I can check my Yahoo! email later. I need to log in to my Dominican email and send a message to the financial aid office, so I’ll just pull up Delicious because that’s where I keep my Dominican links, but…. Yep, Delicious is a Yahoo! company. So, no go on that front. I’ll have to look it up. Same goes for Flickr, although I have no pressing Flickr business at the moment. I plan on heading downtown to check out the Transformers set and see the giant eyeball, so Flickr better be up later…

The moral of the story is that my online life is partially paralyzed today because of the technical problems of one company. And it’s not just me. I looked up “yahoo down” on Twitter and found this amusing Tweet: 2neverland: “Try working at a public library when Yahoo goes down. Shoot me.”

So, while I am excited about the concept of cloud computing and all of the mobility that it will offer, it is days like this that give me pause. If I’m going to give myself over to the Borg, I have to have some confidence that the Borg won’t have a complete meltdown and leave me stranded. Hey, look at that! The Borg, I mean, Yahoo! is back!