Well, according to an AP article on MSNBC, your Sidekick “super-cell” may have amnesia because of a Microsoft server failure.

All of the information you input into your Sidekick is stored at the Microsoft server farm. There is no way of making a local copy, and it isn’t stored on internal memory. Apparently the Microsoft server farm doesn’t understand fault tolerance, RAID, or any of the other techniques that are “industry standards”. I get the feeling from the article that they backup servers occasionally, when someone thinks of it, if there is nothing else going on, rather than on a standard schedule.

No big deal, it’s only about a million people who have lost their address books.

Update: I should add that T-Mobile is going to give their customers a $20 $100 credit for the inconvenience.

If you live in California, anywhere in the state, this is your one-stop shop for the weather warnings, watches, advisories, and special weather statements.

The remnents of Typhoon Melor will be coming ashore late tonight through all of tomorrow, with high gusty winds, and heavy rains. If you live around an area that was burned out within the last two years, there is a probability of mudslides, in addition to flash flooding, and the gusty winds.

The highest winds and heaviest rains will be in the mountains inland from the coast, and the weather will probably be worst from Big Sur up to Marin County, but, pretty much everywhere is going to have nasty weather.

Stay safe.

If you are using a Windows box and wonder why things seem to be much slower than normal the last few days, the BBC has the probable answer: Microsoft readies bumper update

Microsoft will issue its biggest ever security update on 13 October.

The update will include 13 bulletins that between them tackle 34 vulnerabilities.

Microsoft said that eight of the bulletins were rated as critical – the most serious sort of vulnerability.

The security patches will close loopholes in many different programs including different editions of Windows, Internet Explorer and some elements of Office.

This stuff is automatically downloaded in the background [if your machine is on auto-update], so it is eating up your bandwidth. You may notice disk activity when you aren’t doing anything, or a lot of stalling while downloading graphics.

It’s the second Monday in October, so it is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Have a happy one.

By coincidence this is Columbus Day and it is falling on the 12^th of October which was the second Wednesday in 1492 when Europeans discovered something that a lot of people didn’t know was lost. But it’s okay, because Christopher Columbus [AKA: Cristoforo Colombo, Cristóbal Colón] didn’t find what he was looking for and identified what he did find incorrectly. The important thing is that a large area of the map got changed from “here be dragons and sea serpents,” to “here be gold and cannibals” and no mention was made of the oppressive heat, mosquitoes, or hurricanes.

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