Outage

Because it never rains but it pours, we just recovered from a nearly 2-day internet outage here at Icecano headquarters. Apparently the upstream fiber backbone got damaged, and this may or may not have had something to do with the wildfires outside of town. (There’s a reasonably well-sourced rumor that one of the reasons this took so long to recover was that the replacement parts spent most of yesterday stuck in traffic, which is just perfect.)

This next bit isn’t exactly news, but it was remarkable how much stuff just assumes a live, high-speed internet connection now, regardless of whether that makes any sense or needs it or not. Everything I was doing for work yesterday was entirely local to my work machine, and everthing took forever, because nearly every user action still tripped off a background network call that had to time out before it would go on and do the local action I had asked it to do. I know we all got really excited about “the network is the compter,” but maybe profesional tools should keep working right when there’s no connection, you know?

Anyway, the upside is this gives me an excuse to link to brr.fyi, which I have been meaning to link to now for ages. it’s a blog from someone at McMurdo station in Antarctica describing their experiences; they're home now, but still writing some “wrapping it up” reflection-style posts. I had this all on my mind because the author just wrote a post titled: Engineering for Slow Internet.