Typically, when we lose Internet access at home, my first inkling is to start the finger pointing toward our Airport Extreme base station from Apple. Despite a recent upgrade, it seems we lose all connectivity for about 20-30 minutes of each evening, often at the most inopportune times. But, in a flashback reminiscent of the 2000-2002 timeframe, when this happened all the time, tonight, in our corner of Sunnyvale, it's our cable modem that's literally on the blink, denying us connectivity.

All I have to say is thank goodness for nearby neighbors with unsecured wireless basestations that don't have a password. When our home network goes down, I just go to the Airport menubar and choose one of the available networks and keep going.

But truth be told, any time one of the key cogs to the Internet gets wiped out, it has me thinking how vulnerable our information delivery systems are. Prior to the Internet's pervasive presence, we could expect TV to always be available, or in the case of power outage, it was always a smart idea to have a battery-powered radio handy, to keep updated through an emergency. Now, we have made the Internet a key player in our communication, entertainment, news and commerce. Disrupting Web access for communities, regions or on a larger scale would have dramatic effect. Forget the obvious issues of forcing geeks to go outside of their cubicles without sunblock. It actually could stall the way we operate.

I'm not saying a mere blip in Comcast's uptime is the end of the world. I obviously found a work-around. But today's virtual highways are just as important as the real ones and disruptions or snarls could slow us down in a big way.

A big part of me wants to make up reasons to go out and get an Apple iPhone when it debuts June 29th. Steve Jobs' introduction of the product at Macworld San Francisco, ensuing media coverage and reviews, and the company's recently introduced four commercials touting the iPhone have got me musing ways to make my acquisition of an iPhone make sense. And I can't get there.

The iPhone has three major features: A widescreen iPod that plays music and video, a touch-oriented cell phone, and what Apple is calling a fully-featured Web browser, akin to the Safari experience on Mac OS X. But, in order, I have both a 60 Gig iPod and an iPod shuffle already for the music side, and a perfectly capable BlackBerry handset, which gets me e-mail immediately, works well for phone calls, and actually does an adequate job of surfing the Web should I need to. Best of all, I'm not paying for the BlackBerry. Work is. And the BlackBerry service is through Verizon, not AT&T, the sole wireless carrier signed up with the iPhone. So that's two major strikes against my moving to the next awesome product from Apple.

At the dawn of the decade, I probably wouldn't have let that stand in my way. I got the first generation Visor Deluxe handheld when they debuted, the first VisorPhone module that married the Palm OS with the cellphone, and later, the first black and white Treo handset. I also, as noted here before, bought the first generation iPod on the day they debuted.

But now, I'm getting more content with utilizing previous generation hardware. My iPod doesn't play video, and is the 60 Gigabyte model, not 80 Gigabytes. My Apple laptop is a PowerBook G4, not an Intel-based MacBook Pro. Our TiVo is a series one console, and we're not even signed up for high definition broadcast from our cable provider, Comcast. We don't own a video camera, my car is pushing nine years old, and didn't even come with a native CD player, let alone Sirius or XM satellite radio. Sometimes, I even go into Fry's and come out without buying anything. It's as if there's some sort of anonymous group I should be joining...

Inside, I want to spend my money with wanton disregard for budgets and needs. I want to sell recently obsoleted technology on eBay after upgrading to the newest gear. I want to have the newest products before my colleagues and friends even know they exist. But lately, I'm getting more and more content to wait out the first generation until the bugs are out of it, and see if I can get the second generation cheap. It's sad, really. How can I respect myself among my peers now that this is off my chest?

The pace at which I absorb my 180+ RSS feeds is remarkably stable. On weekdays, we see approximately 550 or so items, and on weekends, about half that number, as the blogosphere cools off, allowing families to enjoy one another a bit more than the dim lighting of laptop LCD screens for a change. And just as reliably, my Google Reader Trends marks off my every view. But last night, despite my best efforts, I just didn't get to the last two hundred or so feed items before the witching hour of midnight, and it's thrown my one-day stats into disarray.

Tuesday's baseball game featuring the A's and Red Sox, well documented here already, plus the drive home, plus post-game blogging, saw me scampering to get all my RSS feed reading in before the clock rolled over from P.M. Tuesday night to A.M. Wednesday morning. I knew that if I didn't do "my homework", Google would, correctly, say I read Tuesday's feeds Wednesday, even if, more accurately, I read them late Tuesday night, just after midnight.

You can only hit "J" so many times in a five-minute period. I tried, and I didn't make it.


Note the spike at the right side, about 1 1/2 days' worth of feeds...

So, instead of a uniform Wednesday, my Google Reader trends, at least for the next thirty days, will have a dip from Tuesday, to 342, and a spike on Wednesday, up to 762 items. And while it really shouldn't matter, I feel like I've let the Google team down. It's not as if they didn't accurately retrieve and present me my feeds on time. It's 100 percent my fault. I was late, and will have to face these consequences boldly, taking full responsibility.

Google, is there some way I can do some make up work to have this black mark erased from my record? I'm embarrassed, and I don't feel that it adequately represents my efforts.

First the good news: Technorati is back up.

Then the great news: Technorati isn't afraid to tell its users exactly what happened. After the site saw some serious downtime today, the company explained there was a network equipment failure that hit the company's services in a big way. They believe they've come a long way in offering great services and response times, and will be finding out how to avoid the issue in the future.

Best yet, they reached out to those of us affected. I had called Dave Sifry this afternoon to see what had gone wrong, and if possible, what could be done to help. Unlike just about any other CEO I can think of, he answered the phone in the middle of the crisis.

And the company, as it should, hit the blogosphere to respond. Ian Kallen, in the company's core services engineering group, wrote me during the situation, saying "We're bringing our systems back online now."

In what was no doubt a very frustrating time for Technorati, they didn't hide from the situation, but addressed it and will hopefully learn from it, helping bring enterprise class service to an already excellent product.