CNN is reporting that there has been another Blackberry outage. It was less impactful than the last time around, but at least one question remains: Why does Research in Motion (RIM; maker of the Blackberry) funnel all email traffic through their data centres, rather than having it handled by the individual cellular carriers, which (1) would be like most, if not all, other smart phones, and (2) would provide some diversity?

I’ve written before about the fun I’ve had dealing with the Very Big Banking Corporation (VBBC, not their real name) and their “interactive” voice response system.

One of my dollar store CFLs died last night. I had put it into service to provide some small amount ambient light in my home office when working at the computer. It worked well for this application (they being as weak as they are), but this puts its lifespan at something severely below the 10,000 hours one can expect on average from CFLs.