Thinking ahead. Not thinking ahead.

For some reason I thought about DirecTV and downtime the other day.

As in, I don't think I've had a minute of downtime on my DirecTV/TiVo in over 5 years. More reliable than the electricity where I live, the cable, the DSL, cell service, even the analog landline, which tends to stay up.

One time I stayed at a vacation spot during a huge winter storm and the DirecTV stopped working. I went outside with a broom and knocked a few inches of snow off the dish and it came right back up (the dish still had a decent covering of snow and ice, just not as much).

Satellite thing works pretty well. The client box has never crashed, acted up, or rebooted. And they haven't bricked it, even temporarily, with an update.

On an unrelated and more disappointing note, I've gotten two emails from Microsoft Exchange users at two different companies now, where the email includes a link whose target looks something like http://go-to-exchange-and-get-a-redirect-to/here?url=http://place-i-really-want-to-go

Which fails as soon as you send a link like this to someone whose web browser is outside the firewall and can't connect to the "go-to-exchange-and-get-a-redirect" part. Of course you can copy the destination and edit it yourself, but the idea of a link is it should be clickable.

Surprisingly bad behavior. Even if it's optional or the result of poor Exchange admin, it should be "easy to do the right thing" and apparently it's easy to do something odd instead when configuring outgoing HTML email in Exchange.