Technology is a wonderful thing. We have computers, laptops, servers, the Internet, e-mail, and of course mobile technologies. We use and abuse them all without even a second thought. Then something breaks and we are lost.

It is amazing how much technology controls our lives. It is supposed to be a tool to make our lives easier, but we depend on it so heavily, it controls us. I’m as guilty as anyone in this respect. Today RIMs Blackberry Internet Service went boom again. North America and South America both wound up affected, and yet there was not a lot of talk about it. No CNN headlines, no nothing. It only affected e-mail and if you worked for a company that had a BES server you weren’t affected. Nope just people like me who use the BIS part were.

It drove me crazy. I thought maybe I left Outlook open at home. A visit to my webmail site showed that e-mail was not going to my PC at home, as all of it was still on the main server. A quick google search found a couple of articles about it finally.

Outages happen in the IT world. We all know that. What this instance shows us again is that relying on cloud services is an iffy thing. Its all still a beta product, all of it. The Internet, e-mail, mobile devices, all of it beta products. Don’t be controlled by it, for it is just a tool.