A few weeks ago I posted a note here about how it was taking over 24 hours for Amazon to launch an EC2 instance. Then for a while it seemed to get better. Now it's sucking again.  

I had developed a bit of voodoo. Instead of launching one instance, I'd launch two. Usually one of the two would be ready to go within an hour. But today I've launched eight instances, starting first thing this morning, and none of them have gotten to the point where they would return a Windows password. This coming from an AMI that I was able to launch yesterday just fine. 

I write these notes because I don't know what else to do. I'm sitting here at zero productivity, waiting and waiting. I love EC2. But this is ridiculous. It's like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch. Beatiful plumage. Pushing up daisies.  

Update: The next pair of instances I launched came up right away, as I suspected they might.