...sort of. To recap, suddenly one day my massive Amazon history of purchases, product votes, wish list, etc. disappeared, leaving only my most recent transaction. Freaked, I dropped customer support an email. They reported that I had two accounts with the same email address! I was a little dumbfounded—after all, email address is basically the user ID for Amazon, as far as the end user is concerned. But I could verify what the support person said—I could search for my old wish list and see its contents. What happened? And how could I fix it?

I finally realized today that I just had to log into my new empty account and change the email address, log out, then log back in with the old email address. Worked like a charm—all my wish list and averything were still there.

I’m guessing two things about Amazon's back-end system:

1. Amazon’s system has an internal user ID that’s separate from the user’s email address. Very sensible—as long as it makes sure that more than one account isn't created with the same email address.
2. Amazon must have suffered some sort of catastrophic systems failure around the time I was trying to place my last order that temporarily rendered my account unavailable. Evidence? A new account was seamlessly created with the same email and password through the process of placing the order, although there was an error when I tried to submit the order. Also, my shopping cart in the original account still contained the items that I bought in my recent order on the “new” account when I finally logged back in today.

Weird, but strangely reassuring. Even through a major system crack-up, I was still able to place an order.

Cory at Boing Boing posted about the Estonian public WiFi system in Talinn. Now, in addition to excellent dark beers and the music of Arvo Pärt, a third reason to vacation in everyone’s favorite former Soviet state.

I’m waiting this morning for the carpenter and the electrician to do some elective work in our dining room. We have an awful little wood-paneled closet in the “solarium” portion of our dining room that we’d like to make usable. The carpenter is coming to rip out the paneling and install drywall if necessary so we can install shelving to hold—well, probably excess glassware, as we probably have enough to stock a small Beacon Hill pub. The electrician is just being asked to install a couple of sconce lights in the dining room.

I thought I was done with contractors in the house, but now that I’m waiting for them again the thought isn’t so bad. Nice to have professionals come in before you screw everything up.

If you read manuals, you probably already know this. But apparently some cable modems—at least the model supplied to us by AT&T Broadband—react badly when placed near a wireless hub, such as my graphite AirPort Base Station. For me the problem manifested itself as dropped packets (meaning generally slow traffic) and ultimately a complete disconnect about twenty minutes after cycling the power on the cable modem. Ever since the broadband tech told me about the potential RF interference effect in the cable modem and I moved the base station further away, I’ve had no further problems—performance is back to really good.