From the Editor’s Desk: Online Accounts, a Cautionary Tale (Premium)

We've all had those experiences where time seems to speed up or slow down unexpectedly. I'm having such a moment as I write this. It's Monday morning. On Friday, I was in Puerto Vallarta, getting some work done, packed and ready to fly back to Mexico City after visiting with Richard and his wife for five days, and feeling pretty good about things. And then all hell broke loose, and I've spent the intervening three days frantically trying to fix a thorny and unexpected problem that came out of nowhere like a cast iron pan to the face.

That's the thing. It's only been three days. But perhaps because of all the stress I experienced in the interim, it feels like Puerto Vallarta was three weeks ago. I feel like I've been in Mexico City the whole time. But despite flying here a week ago Saturday from the U.S., we've only been here, in Mexico City--checks the calendar--for three full days. In what the calendar tells me is 9 days. My head is spinning.

Here's what happened.
Friday
Friday morning, I woke up around 7:30 am. This is notable only because I usually get up around 7:00, but the hour time change between Pennsylvania and Mexico (for now, it's two hours in the middle of the year) means that I was closer than I wanted to be to recording First Ring Daily at 8:00 am (9:00 in PA). So I texted Brad, asking if it was OK to record a half hour later than usual, at 8:30 am Mexico time (9:30 for Brad, and back in PA). It was. And so I was able to read a bit and relax, and then get cleaned up and record the show. Which I did from the balcony of Richard's suite using my phone and a mini-tripod, as I had all that week.

We finished at 8:45 or so, which I know because I texted Brad afterward with something he had asked about. But you won't find this episode of First Ring Daily here on the site or on the Thurrott.com YouTube channel. When Brad tried to post it, he encountered an error. And he texted me at 10:23 to tell me that something changed with the YouTube account and he couldn't get into the Thurrott.com channel. He asked if I could re-add him so he could upload the video.

When my phone pinged with this message, we were getting ready to eat breakfast with Richard and his wife. I don't usually eat breakfast, but we were leaving midday, and I wanted to spend more time with them. In an odd coincidence, Laurent had messaged me on Slack earlier, at 10:06 am, about a problem with the Thurrott Feed account on X/Twitter. It wasn't urgent, he said, but we have to accept some new terms of service, and the 2FA on the account was still tied to Brad's phone for some reason. Given everything going on at that moment, I had decided to punt the X/Twitter issue to Monday--a problem for Future Paul to deal with--but these two things happening back-to-back felt weird.

So I bailed on breakfast and stalked back to the suite. Our bags were still sitting there, packed, inside the door, which was weird to me because we had been instructed to that early so they...