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The first thing, when one is being worried as to whether one will have to have an operation or whether one is a literary failure, is to assume absolutely mercilessly that the worst is true, and to ask What Then? If it turns out in the end that the worst is not true, so much the better; but for the meantime the question must be resolutely put out of mind. Otherwise your thoughts merely go round and round a wearisome circle , now hopeful, now despondent, now hopeful again—that way madness lies.
" C.S. Lewis —The METNAV shop at McGuire AFB was hard to miss, if you could get into the right area, and you know what you were looking for. Out across the flightline, across the old 18 runway, and across a winding series of roads, a small squat building sat — no antennas or other identifying marks. Just plain, white, one story, with a small parking lot and a few trucks, either camouflaged or USAF blue. Driving into the parking lot, you’d find an odd collection of vehicles, but many of us drove 4wd’s of some sort. A good number of the pieces of equipment we worked on were only reachable through off road routes. If you owned a 4wd vehicle, the fateful pager call at 2am didn’t require a trip to the shop, across the flight line, old runways, and in the winter piles of snow pushed up against the sides of the airplane routes, to get a truck usable to reach the failed piece of equipment.
In the line of cars, you would see one that was, well, different. This particular car was, in fact, the subject of a number of discussions in the shop — you’d almost think our little Continue reading
Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. … We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake. … We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society.
" Michael Lewis/Boomerang —The post Self-Control appeared first on 'net work.
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C.S. Lewis used to say that for each new book he read, he would read two old books — books written before he was born, preferably. The point to this seemingly odd reading habit was to avoid the blind spot — every age has a blind spot, a obsessive passion around which everything else must fall or be crushed. Much like ages, each profession also has a blind spot of the same sort.
Technology is no exception.
So what is the blind spot of the technology world? I would say it’s human nature. Engineers have a very bad habit of making people into manipulable objects — for instance, “the soul is software, and the body is hardware.” The analogy might be a good one, but it’s also, like most analogies, decidedly not the whole story.
This belief that we can build a community based Continue reading
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Last week wasn’t a good one for the cause of network engineering. United Airlines grounded flights because of a router failure, the New York Stock Exchange stopped trading for several hours because of a technical problem, and the Wall Street Journal went off line for several hours due to a technical malfunction. How should engineers react to these sorts of large scale public outages? The first option, of course, is to flail our arms and run out of the room screaming. Panic is a lot of fun when you first engage, but over time it tends to get a little boring, so maybe panic isn’t the right solution here.
Another potential reaction is to jump on the “it’s too complex” bandwagon. sure, a lot of these systems are very complex — in fact, they’re probably too complex for the actual work they do. Complexity is required to solve hard problems; elegance is choosing the path with the least amount of complexity that will solve the problem. Far too often, in the engineering world, we choose the more complex path because of some imagined requirement that never actually materializes, or because we imagine a world where the solution we’re putting in Continue reading
I think I’ve finally fixed the mailing list to send an email of the posts here twice a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) — an attempt at balancing between spamming people and providing information about what’s going on at ‘net Work. Sign up here if you’re interested (the bottom half of the page).
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