Prime Day and Amazon-a-versary

Today is Prime Day at Amazon, a day in which there are special deals for Amazon Prime members.

Prime Day 2017

The main deals are on Amazon products like the Kindle or the Echo.  Not exactly as interesting to me as the Steam Summer Sale, but I’ll go take a look all the same.

Today also happens to be an anniversary for me with Amazon.  Twenty years ago today, July 11, 1997, I placed my first order at Amazon.com.  You can go see all of your order history on your account page, which can be both fascinating and disturbing.

My order was for a book, because at the time Amazon was pretty much an online bookstore.  But they were expanding into music CDs as well.  The whole thing wasn’t profitable yet, but it was the dotcom era and people were interested in grabbing market share first and making money later.

That second bit was the catch of course, and the downfall of companies like Netscape.

I went to Amazon.com twenty years ago because they had selection beyond even the largest local bookstore.

Today the profitable enterprise that is Amazon it is my first stop for all sorts of things.  I recently bought a replacement filter for our refrigerator from them.  It has become to people today what the Sears catalog must have been for those in rural settings back towards the end of the 19th century, and then some.  They own Twitch and the Internet Movie Database and Goodreads and Alexa and Audible, each of which touches my online life.

Amazon is hardly perfect, but they do seem to be here to stay.

YC119.1 Update Recalled, YC118.10 Rolled Back to New Eden

Today was patch day for EVE Online, and we were supposed to get the first update of 2017, or YC119 as it is styled in the distant future of internet spaceships.

The actual official patch graphic

However, according to an update from CCP, the code deployed with the update was problematic.

Due to an issue with the 119.1 release which resulted in server stability issues after its deployment, we will be re-deploying the 118.10 release while we work on a fix.

This led to an extended downtime as 118.10 was restored to Tranquility.  TQ was initially taken down just before 12:00 UTC when problems were first noticed, with the roll back being completed and the server cluster back online for players as of 13:15 UTC according to the forum update.

CCP did not say exactly what caused the instability and nothing in the YC119.1 patch notes jumps out at me as a likely suspect, the update seeming to be mostly adjustments to current features as opposed to anything new.  Maybe is was those Mordu’s Legion SKINs listed on the updates page.  We haven’t had a patch day failure in ages.

So the patch has been pushed back while CCP figures out what went awry.  We can still listen to the launch theme, which carries the now mildly ironic title, “The Ones We Left Behind.”