Having a bit of "down time" with fam and friends has been great ... hope yours has been at least as good.

Seems like about a zillion years since I was buying student tickets for games at Mizzou (the University of Missouri), but like many folks I've continued to follow their teams over the years. Really only problem in that ... for most of the past 30 years they've been pretty bad, well actually that would be understating things ... a lot!

But all that's changing now, and for the first time in my lifetime I got to see Mizzou play a football game in January. With polite apologies to any of you Arkansas fans out there, today's 35-7 win over Arkansas was awesome.

I mention all of this to give you a bit of background on the rest of this post.

The Kitty

In a recent post I introduced the "mad kitty", which I will use on any post discussing reliability problems, failures, over-promised and under-delivered features and services, and any other part of our industry that should be done better.

I will continue to use the kitty as events warrant. If everyone was doing the best possible then I'd back off ... would it really make sense to get mad at a cow for not being a very good conversationalist?

Probably not.

But the simple reality is the day in which it was ok for a SaaS offering to go down for "system maintenance", or for a suddenly hot web2 site to crash under load are way, way behind us. Besides, it's simply not necessary anymore ... not with the availability of intrinsically scalable and reliable technologies like our app fabric, at least.

So I will continue to comment on outages, particularly when the organization in question really should know better. And the kitty will mark those posts.

Kitty's Heritage

Turns out that kitty has a bit of a heritage.

As much as I like Mizzou, I have a couple of brothers who almost make me feel completely indifferent. Both of them have always been part of communities like tigerboard.

In any case, as long as I can remember Mizzou had a "paw" logo. Simple, looked great, easily recognizable. There was only one problem, it looked a little too much like Clemson's. Never mind that their's was orange, turned sideways, and generally looked pretty different - Clemson's attorneys complained and Mizzou blinked.

So time for a new logo.

Having nothing better to do (or at least deciding to do nothing better), speculation about the logo was pretty intense. Lots of arguing, opinions, people getting mad, blah blah blah.

Then one of my brothers decided to tell people that he'd gotten an advance copy of the new logo. When people challenged him to produce it, he took about five minutes in a drawing program and came up with the mad kitty.

People went nuts. I mean, there were a bunch of people who were really mad.

All sorts of words went flying - "this is stupid", "my kid could've done better", - and far, far worse. It's almost like these guys didn't have proper upbringings or something.

After awhile my brother let on that he might have been speculating just a wee bit. In fact, it may be that the university had gotten a bona-fide designer to come up with a real logo (which they did, of course).

When you think about it, there are some times when the fact that these communities of interest are fairly virtual can be pretty handy.

This was one of those times for my brother.

Epilogue

Turns out that kitty has had a bit of a life since then. Mad Kitty logo gear has sold a bit on cafepress, and he continues to show up in all sorts of places in and around mizzou-land.

Kitty even ended up doing a bit of traveling. When my other brother was deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11, he took a series of photos entitled "Kitty goes to war". I'll probably post some of those every once in awhile.

This all turned into a bit of fun for our family, and eventually for a bunch of other Mizzou fans as well. I hope that you've also had plenty of things that you could laugh about over this holiday season.

Here's to a great 2008!