My ISP had a massive e-mail failure yesterday, that affected customers all across the country. Their e-mail servers went down at just after midnight, and the issue wasn’t resolved until 6pm! 18 hours without e-mail! They claim that any incoming mail sent during the outage was queued, but I didn’t get any mail once the servers came back up, and other people on DSLReports have had similar experiences.

This isn’t the first time that Crapcast has had a massive e-mail failure of this scope. Thankfully, after the last episode, I made it a point to have my most important incoming mail go through my own domains, instead of relying on their shoddy mail servers. I still get some stuff through them, but it maybe accounts for 15% of my total e-mail.

It’s unfortunate that they focus their energy on stupid commercials, instead of redundancy within their network. There’s no reason in the world that millions of people should be without e-mail for over 18 hours!! Many people had their businesses affected by this outage, as they rely on Crapcast for their e-mail. This is a HUGE mistake, and hopefully people will learn from this incident.

FIOS can’t get here soon enough!

Recently, I started offering some specialized services (search engine optimization, performance enhancements, customized themes, etc) to blog owners. My first customer was a friend who needed me to build him a blog for his travel agency.

He previously hosted a “company website” through Yahoo, but wasn’t happy with the results. So we decided to use the power of Social Media and Web 2.0, and built a company blog where he could post about last-minute deals and specials.

Because he’s a friend, I didn’t make him sign a contract, and I didn’t collect an up-front deposit. The site went live in early March, and he asked if I could wait until April 1st for payment. I had no problem with that.

April 1st comes around, and I get an e-mail from him asking if I could wait a few more months, as he’s having some cash-flow issues!

Sadly, I’ve seen this happen all too often. Now, I’m not worried about my buddy, so I’ll give him time to pay me back. But if this were a total stranger, he could have taken me for a ride, and I’d have no recourse.

Morale of the story? If you want to get paid, make sure you’ve got a contract in place!

I got an e-mail from Houlihan’s declaring April as National Eat Out Month. It’s a clever marketing campaign to get you out of your home and into their restaraunts. But in the e-mail, they give you some interesting facts..

Did you know that:

• The food service industry is one of the largest private sector employers, employing nearly 9% of the US workforce.
• Their economic impact is expected to exceed $1.5 trillion in 2009
• 69% of people with families surveyed say eating out makes managing their day to day lives easier

So by eating in, you’re actually hurting the economy! It sounds crazy, but we’ve seen a LOT of restaraunts shutting down here in recent months. Quiznos is totally gone. Lone Star closed down last month. There is one Pizza Hut left, and it’s operating on borrowed time. Local restaraunts are also feeling the crunch, and a few have already closed in recent months.

It sucks. All those jobs lost.

All across the web, “clever” people are trying to play pranks on their readers.. Shoemoney jumped the gun and posted a story about getting aquired by the Hanso Foundation, and moving to Portland (where he’d be working from a submarine). Amazingly enough, the post got over 500 replies, most of who had no idea this was a lame joke, and that the Hanso Foundation is from Lost.

Jim at The Net Fool threw up a Macintosh-style theme for his blog (clever), and included a link to see all the changes he made.. Of course, when you clicked his link, you got rick-rolled, and you couldn’t close it out until you clicked OK about 40 times. I feel bad for anyone that clicked his link while at work, as Jim’s prank probably managed to get them fired.

Google released a “new feature” for Gmail, where it’d automatically reply to e-mails for you. What a time saver! I’ll give Google props, it was actually pretty humorous.