hey, co-worker Rory Browne gets namechecked on James Hamilton's blog! woo

hey, I know a few of those! 'I need more help on a project I’m driving at Amazon where we continue to make big changes in our datacenter network to improve customer experience and drive down costs while, at the same time, deploying more gear into production each day than all of Amazon.com used back in 2000. It’s an exciting time and we have big changes happening in networking. If you enjoy and have experience in operating systems, networking protocol stacks, or embedded systems and you would like to work on one of the biggest networks in the world, [get in touch].' -- James Hamilton

Rightscale CTO on last week's outage; pretty detailed, good round-up of useful commentary from around the web, too

jobs fair this weekend in Dublin, in The Mansion House -- if you're interested in talking to someone about working for Amazon, come along! (plug plug)

"in e-mail from Microsoft employees, you may find a stray J [...] The J started out its life as a smiley-face. The WingDings font puts a smiley face where the letter J goes. [...] As the message travels from machine to machine, the font formatting may get lost or mangled, resulting in the letter J appearing when a smiley face was intended." aha! mystery solved. Amazon is full of mysterious "J"s in emails, and now I know why

interesting idea from Joe -- track your cloud-hosting spend in real-time