As a young Ensign I worked for a old Destroyer Squadron Commodore. He had a saying that has always stayed with me, I guess because it's so true. He liked to say "One Aw, S**t is worth about 1,000 Atta boys".

Well we've earned a few technical "Aw, S**ts this month and are painfully aware of the quality service "Atta Boys" we burned up in the process.

We are making some expensive and extensive changes in our server complex to manage down the impact to our customers' perceived service levels when the inevitable but unforseeable server failure occurs.

We are building robust redundantcy and fail-over features into our systems. We are searching out and eliminating and/or correcting all "single point of failure" potential and are enhancing our back-up procedures and capabilities. This will take a little time but should be completed within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, our system, which over the past year (up until the past two weeks) has been very stable and with a very good historical level of "up time", will continue to serve you, we think as capably as it has in the past (prior to these recent server issues.

We have a goal of giving you the "dial tone" every time you hit our site, so much so that you will literally take it for granted and never have to give it another thought. As our technical solution comes on line we think you'll be getting that level of internet service.

Now, my technical expertise in these matters is usually surpassed by those of a broken red brick, so I can't get into all the neat techno bable details my partners could tell you all about (high "eye-glaze" factor for me). However, I do understand a bit about risk analysis and system process evaluation and think we've hit on a pretty "Aw, S**t" proof solution.