The System Is Down.

Now this is nice. I like more of an explanation than "the service was out; now its not" and the incident report gives a bit more detail. Although its a little vague about exactly what happened, you get the jist that they had a bug in their server load sharing algorithm, so when one was taken off-line for maintenance, too many people were redirected to another. The "multiple downstream overload conditions" sounds like a neat cascading system of propagating errors. But maybe I'm a big dork.

• Apps Status Dashboard

P.S. The System Is Down is a nice beat for all your lightswitch rave needs.

P.S.S. I totally didn't notice this outtage and I'm on the gmails like all effing day.

Drunk Dialing Is So 2003.

I dunno if you're familiar with your "labs" tab in gmail (I'm assuming you have gmail because everyone who's anyone does) but there are some interesting little alpha customizations you can enable there.  Take, for example, this one I saw today.

Now, I know they don't exactly come out and say it, but this tool is obviously designed to keep you from belligerently drunk emailing inappropriate things to your less understanding friends / coworkers.  Just enter the days and times you're likely to be plastered and google's got your back.  Too bad I can also send gmails from my phone though...

Oh Billy!

Brace yourself to be overwhelmed by a flood of communications. (Actually just me cause you losers don't have Helios. I'm just bragging.) When I first got my Ocean it had POP email access to my gmail account. Then Google added in IMAP support so that my inbox online was synced with the inbox in my pocket. Pretty sweet, but it wasn't push. That is, I had to check for new mail by hand. Like a barbarian. Well those days are spent cause Helio just rolled out push email to all its devices. I'm not really sure how that works (isn't it gmail that pushes to Helio?) but I'm not gonna start rocking the boat. My gmails and jmails show up on the alerts menu like SMSes, missed calls and voicemails. Of course anyone who reads this will be all over those "oh, I haven't checked my email" excuses like rasberry jam on a hot, buttered english muffin. Crannies, nooks, whatever. So bring on the information glut in full 3G fashion. I hope I don't drown.

• Heliocity: Gmail gets Push

Oh, and check out this video about SMSing. Its got an amusing main character who you might recognize from the pictures above.
Heliocity: texting your way to love