This is a rant, sorry, but not totally content free.

Any email or communication that I get that isn't interesting to me is spam. Because I'm a hypocrite that includes the email I specifically asked to see, boring is still spam. I want a check box that says only send me stuff I'll be interested in, and then it had better still be amazing.

So how does this affect a company or individual? Don't send email. Unless you can guarantee that the recipient will be interested in what you have to say, Just don't. This includes deal of the frigging day.

All companies that you and I deal with have masses of information about us, they are just being lazy.  I'm a bloke, sending me lazer hair removal offers is not going to make me want to spend my money. You are now an annoyance, the hole is only going to get deeper and yet you stil seem to be digging.

Facebook knows everything about me, so why the hell do I see un-targeted adverts. If they charged by impression adverts would get targeted really quickly. Targeting population segments based on loads of information is supposed to be a Marketing wet dream so whats going on. In fact i think that is the definition of a Market.

There are companies that can do this and do it well, unfortunately the cost of over communication isn't measured only the conversion.

Assume that you get to communicate with an individual once a year. As an example take 50k customers (nice to have) and segment them into fifty groups. So you're compiling one email a week, leave them alone at christmas please. For that thousand people find something that they will want to see. That is not hard. Please bear in mind though that you don't get to talk to them again for a year so make it good. Or better still don't send the email at all.

And don't ever call me after 6, just don't. There's a reason that I'm available then, and it's not for you.

I've worked with a big CDN before, its expensive and a bit of a pain. But it they work, oh hell do they work. If you want to get content to Asia in a 1/3rd of the time then its the way forward. But your going to pay for it so you'd better be making a load of cash.

I discovered this nice company today CloudFlare, basically a CND for small sites. There are some added security features as well but its the CDN thats interesting.

Ok this is going to be a little bit of a rant, and I may mention Microsoft a few times. Error messages and their content are important. If they dont provide a course of action then they are essentially lists of keywords to stuff into google.

Recently I was forced to have to mess around with SQL Server. Running on an image that was given to me my someone else. So far so messy. I couldn't not get the Management Studio to connect. Kept geting a message about pipes, you look at the detail you get a stack trace. Essentially some comms stuff somewhere has spat its dummy. Great helpful, thanks.

Poking about ensued, all of the usual suspects, checking services etc.

The VM was unreliable anyway so I thought sod it I'll reinstall the whole damn things, go from clean. During the install of SWL Server there is a big fat button saying as this user to access the database, seems a sensible thing to do. So totally default install. Management studio same error, cant even see that the DB exists.

Removed the DB.

Second install, thought what the hell I'll add the Administrator Group, I'm one of them, that will work.

Problem solved.

At no point did any of the messages that I got indicate that permissions were the issue, and the big fat button on the installer encouraged me to do the wrong damn thing. Err FAIL.