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burying some cable The past two nights at work have been very quiet and I am not complaining. I suspect that the slow pace has to do with the telephone companies keeping their activity to a minimum so early in the year. Wait. I need to revise that last statement. There was some scheduled maintenance this morning that generated hundreds of alarms for us, but they weren't something that we needed to address. Despite the fact that the maintenance didn't require any troubleshooting on my part, it was still annoying. Nodes on the network would go down for a few minutes and then start to recover. As the night became morning, the down time intervals grew shorter and shorter. A node would go down for a moment and then immediately recover. Sadly our monitoring software tends to bog down from such treatment. On a more positive note, I suspect that most end users were probably unaware that anything was happening with their data circuit. At this point in my career, this kind of thing is just another day at work for me and I don't think too much about it. A decade ago, I found the whole idea of data being passed through wires across long distances to be fascinating if not somewhat mysterious. How did the data get to where it needed to go? Who laid down that cable? Who maintained it? Now I know the answers to those questions and find it very mundane. I still have some questions about the whole process, but what I wonder more about is what does the average person on the street think when they see some telephone cable crew crawling down a manhole. ... Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly continue to impress me with their book Local and I think that it has to do with the subject matter being so familiar. With the story focusing on just one person and some events in her life, it feels very real. This is a story of an average teenage girl living her life and it doesn't have to be overly dramatic to maintain my interest. |