Gripe Line: Some e-commerce sites, it appears, are making it harder and harder for users to log-off, Ed Foster reports in Amazon makes you lie to log off. One reader, in fact, got “confirmation from Amazon that the best way to sign out from your account is to lie to them about who you are.” The reader explains that, “you have to find a page on the site that has ‘If you’re not (your name), click here’ and click on it, thereby saying you’re not you.” What’s even more odd is that it was an Amazon rep who actually stated that the proper process for logging out is to engage in the aforementioned lie. Foster’s theory is that “it’s a pretty simple equation: the fewer clicks it takes to buy, and the more clicks it takes to log out, the more money for Amazon.” Columnist’s corner: One variety of trial by fire is a night shift laden with spun-down drives. That’s precisely what happened to the new guy in this week’s Off the Record. The little tech that could. It all started when one of the drives went offline at oh, about 3 in the a.m. Next thing ‘John’ knew, “there were some five drives and at least nine disk packs that just would not spin up,” our author writes. “Result: the loss of many tens of thousands of 1960s dollars’ worth of hardware.” But this one has a happy ending, folks. Best of the blogs: Although it’s a stretch, and still in the rumor phase, iPhone Extreme does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? “Let me guess. Extreme will have 3G, a better phone and a user-replaceable battery,” stabs Mike Barton in this Tech Watch post. “Maybe Apple should call it the ‘iPhone Legal.'” Careers: In response to a reader who is irreplaceable at his company and trying to do something to fix it, Bob Lewis recommends a higher-risk approach. This reader, you see, has trained several people who ultimately left the company, and has pushed to remove the complex software on which he was the lead developer. Lewis’ suggestion is a modification of the what-if-I-was-hit-by-a-bus argument. “The risk to you, of course, is that not all managers are businesslike when the chips are down,” he writes in Involuntarily irreplaceable. Software Development