Geekery Archive

It's been a busy week, hence the light-to-nonexistant posting. If I were any good, I'd be hammering away at the keyboard like Mike (and pals) at Cold Fury.

Work has been insanely busy. Customers who ought not to be fiddling with their networks during the Christmas retail rush have been breaking things. This puts them in direct contention for my time with customers who don't have to worry about retail sales, who plan on using the holiday season to break things.

Plus, it's time for the annual performance review. That would be going a lot quicker if the "goals" in my review weren't phoney-baloney boilerplate that doesn't apply to what I do. I guess I should just write some phoney-baloney boilerplate "accomplishments" to match... but that's a good deal more difficult than you might expect.

I took a fall during the wee hours Friday night/Saturday morning; it hasn't helped. I did something painful to my right leg (the good one) that's somewhat distracting. At least I didn't hurt my hands/wrists/arms in any way; I depend on them rather a lot.

I'm noticing a decline in my walking ability. I'm shakier on my feet than I've been in a while, and despite the nearly year-long regimen of physical therapy, there's weakness now I haven't had in maybe six months. I'm hoping the medicos get me in for that previously mentioned plasmapheresis treatment pretty soon... while I can still drive.

On the plus side, I got a package on Friday, full of wrapped boxes from the relatives in California. Nice. I'll resist temptation, and hold off opening any of them. The peanut butter fudge my mom made should hold me over until Thursday. Or at least until 4pm today.

Mom deserves her own show on the Food Network solely on the basis of her peanut butter fudge, that's how good it is.

At the end of a discussion of a customer's network topology:

Russ(17:28:14): no matter how fast his LAN is, the choke point is going to be his WAN link to the net
Russ(17:29:48): so for all practical purposes, 100Mbps on the LAN will be fine here
Ron(17:30:08): alrighty
Ron(17:30:14): thanks russ! how can I repay you?
Russ(17:30:48): I take cash, checks and credit cards
Ron(17:31:32): :-D money not enough
Russ(17:32:03): no... but it will do until something better comes along

ATTENTION:

If you get an e-mail titled "Nude Photos of Sarah Palin" in the subject line, do not open it. It might contain a virus.

If you get an e-mail titled, "Nude Photos of Hillary Clinton" in the subject line, do not open it. It might contain nude photos of Hillary Clinton.

I just realized that my sidebar drop-down blogroll buttons don't work in IE. Why don't you people tell me these things?

They work on the old version of the site, and of course they work in Firefox. I'm pretty sure I copied the code properly. But obviously something must be hosed somewhere.

Ugh. Well, I guess I know how I'll be spending my free time.

My work week begins on Thursdays now. I'm very fortunate to be on a 4-day 10-hour schedule rather than working 5×8. At least, I think I'm fortunate. Seems to be OK so far. Having three days off every week sure seems to be pretty nice.

One upside of having recently been converted from a contract employee to a regular employee (have I mentioned that before? I forget) is that, much to my surprise, I now get a "differential" for working nights and weekends. Differential, as in overtime.

Niiiiiiiice.

My work days now start at 2pm rather than 4pm. The only downside I've noticed so far is that if I need to get something done outside the house before work, I have to get up earlier and really hustle to get it done before work starts. I'm still of a mind that having three days off every week is more than adequate compensation for that minor difficulty.

Quiet night at work tonight; I only had one call.

Just one.

I spent seven and a half hours on that conference call... and then another hour and a half writing my notes on the problem and the solution.

Bourbon, take me away.

Just testing my w.bloggar capability.

Yes, I know, I still need to populate the sidebars, fiddle with the visited link colors, adjust some of the spacing and whatnot.

Yes, I did sleep. From about 1am to about 4am. Not exactly what I would usually hope for, but I don't have to work later today/tonight, so a nap this afternoon should see me through.

There are still a lot of little things I need to do with the site before I'm happy with the overall look and feel, but at least I have figured out the MT4 template structure.

I'm fairly sure I'll be working on this for a while — tweaking settings, adjusting the sidebar contents, and so on.

If you encounter any particular problems, please feel free to let me know.

Sometime in the past couple of days this site got hacked. My archives are a bit hosed, with spam hyperlinks installed on the pages. It looks llike it happened sometime between Wednesday night and Thursday afternoon.

I'm working on cleaning it up.

More to the point, I've finally been spending time working on the MT4 upgrade, and I think I finally have a grip on the templating issues. I may, however, make the switch first, then worry about templates, styles, and designs.

So don't be surprised if the look here changes suddenly, without (further) warning.

Update: So... what do you think so far? I hope comments are working....

I haven't said anything about it, but as of a week ago, I have a new job.

Well, OK, it's the same job I've been doing for the last three years. The "new" part of it is that I've been converted from "contractor" status to "regular" at Major Telecommunications Company Which Shall Remain Nameless.

Technically, I'm a manager now, and not even an first-level manager, but my duties are essentially the same. They can assign subordinates to me now, I guess, but I can't imagine why they'd need to do so. I'm pretty sure I'd rather manage networks than people, anyway.

My first day as a regular was Friday the 15th, so in the mail today — for the first time in over 10 years — I received an actual physical paycheck... for one day's work. The 15th was the last day of the MTCWSRN pay period.

I've done direct deposit for so long, I'm not sure I remember what to do with one of these things.

It's amazing what a decent night's sleep does for both mind and body... even if your "night" goes until noon, or sometimes even later.

Yesterday was a challenge from start to finish; it may have been the busiest day I've had in two years — the first half physically, the second half mentally.

From the moment I rolled out of the rack, it was go-go-go. Shower, dress, feed the cats. Because of an upcoming change in my employment situation (more about that later) I had to dash out to get some paperwork notarized. Then a run to the pet store for a load of kitty litter. That stuff is heavy; good thing I have a full-size pickup truck.

I'd seen my regular doctor on Thursday, and he finally decided that my peripheral neuropathy was worthy of being treated, so he wrote a scrip for Neurontin. So, a stop at the pharmacy, to drop off the new prescription.

But I wasn't done running around yet. Next was physical therapy. I was still sore from Wednesday's labors, but along with the usual strength-building exercises, I managed a sans-cane walk of 900 feet, at a speed of .91 miles/hour.

Someone please inform the media.

My walking is getting better, but it isn't really getting to be good. Small objects are big obstacles, and while what I do could be, in the broadest sense, considered "walking," it often bears more than a passing resemblance to waddling. As significant to me as the distance and speed is my increasing ability to avoid disaster with what might be termed "fancy footwork" — I'm getting better at recovering from nearly falling over, though as I get a bit bolder with my walking, the tendency to tip over is a bit more frequent.

I must remember the rule.

Thoroughly exhausted after an hour of abuse at the hands of the therapist, I headed... not home, but to run more errands. First to the vet; more about that later. Then it was back to the pharmacy to pick up my new prescription. Only then did I get to go home.

I got home, crawled up the stairs, took my new meds, and logged on just in time to begin my shift at work... and that's when my day really began.

When you do tech support for an installed base of 30,000+ routers, there are going to be bad days, and mine began immediately — a routing problem landed on my desk precisely 21 seconds after the start of my shift. I don't really mind routing problems, but some are annoying rather than interesting to investigate. And I can count myself fortunate that there are not usually problems stacked up waiting for my arrival.

I've never said and I probably never will say for whom I work, other than the obvious "big telecommunications & networking company," but I will say this: my teammates really are among the best engineers in the networking business. We generally try to take care of each other and not drop junk on the next shift to come online.

The first annoyance of the day was quickly dealt with, and I was readying myself for the next broken router to drop on my desk when I was pinged by my manager. It seems one of our largest customers — I won't (and will never) say who, but I guarantee you know who they are — is doing a migration from one service we offer to a new service, and they're doing it at hundreds of their retail locations. New routers, new T1 and ATM lines, new voice-over-IP setups... egads. So, I got to spend my evening watching for dead routers and making sure that any incidents were properly followed-up upon. There were dozens. I lost count.

Oh, and another customer had a funky T1 problem that had gone on for so long that they were seeing red and needed their hand held all night long by senior engineering staff (i.e., my teammates and I) particularly as our senior management was watching the progress of the issue.

I should also note that my new meds can cause drowsiness. Staying alert would have been a challenge, but between my regular workload, the "high touch customer" hand-holding, and the migrations, I was researching, thinking hard, typing and/or talking every minute of the night, often on more than one issue simultaneously. I barely had time for bathroom and cat-feeding breaks.

By the end of my shift at midnight, I was toast. Burnt toast. I fed the cats and went to bed.

It was, all in all, a very productive day, and I slept like a log. Kismet woke me up this morning with his usual "I'm grooming daddy's head!" behaviour. There are worse ways to wake up.

Yesterday, users of Internet Explorer version 7 were probably unable to view this site, or many other blogs, due to a bug in IE7 triggered by the Sitemeter code many blogs have embedded on their pages.

Information on the problem here, with specifics about the IE7 bug here.

Sitemeter appears to have resolved the problem on their end for the time being.

But... why are you still using IE7? Get Firefox.

As a geek, it would be remiss of me not to point this out: World's First Computer Is Finally Built. It's stunning, a real mechanical work of art.

(You have to sit through a 30-second ad, but it is so worth the wait.)

(Via Hot Air headlines.)

The find of the day: An Engineer's Guide to Cats.

"If you have one cat, you're just a guy who has a cat. If you have two cats, well, the cats are friends, so they can keep each other company. When you have three cats, you start to get to be that guy who has all those cats."

There's a good chance that, by this time next week, I'll be "that guy who has all those cats."

It's good to be an engineer.

Mycah's aspect ratio: 1.79.

(Found via Maggie.)

I've installed the new software — MT4.1 (the open source variety) and have begun working on the template redesign.

You can see the current state of affairs here.

This is a lot more complicated than the older MT template system. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. It might be a while before I get even the basic functionality I need ready to roll out.

In what may be a sign of things to come, I made a trip to the office yesterday to get my new laptop configured with all the standard corporate software. The folks there at the office were rather surprised to see me — the last time I was there was a brief stop in June.

In what may be a further sign, the configuration appointment was cancelled by our helpdesk people, and I came home unconfigured to work my shift at my usual desk here.

So I have this nice shiny new laptop that is as yet unuseable for work purposes... and I'm not particularly interested in using it for anything else, either. It occurred to me today that I spend virtually every waking minute in front of a computer... and to be honest, it's getting pretty old.

It'll happen in due course, but I'd kill to be able to go out to the garage and do a little woodworking.

The config appointment is now rescheduled for tomorrow. Driving isn't hard at all, but it's still rather a difficult chore to get cleaned up, dressed up and packed up to go to the office, and will continue to be for a while, but the key thing is that it's getting easier.

Weekend afternoons/evenings at work, we're perpetually in a state of being short-handed. There are typically only two or three of us on duty until our Singapore office comes online, but they go the minimal-staffing route on weekends, too. So at best, there are only four or five of us on duty at night to handle 30,000 managed routers and switches.

Usually, this isn't a problem. Routers are, on the whole, pretty reliable beasts — certainly as compared to PCs. I have personally seen routers with "up" times in excess of five years — running for over five years without crashing, without failing.

[One story, almost certainly apocryphal, is told in networking circles of a router that had been walled up in a disused closet, and for years no one ever realized it was there until they got curious about where some particular ethernet cables were leading.]

When these usually-reliable devices fail, though, they can do so quite catastrophically. Such was the case this weekend.

Saturday night I spent the entire night on one conference call to deal with a switch that had failed. When that switch failed, we lost access to scads of other devices — how many, exactly, I never learned.

The call started early that morning before my shift; a card in the switch was replaced, which was when the real problems began. I joined twenty other people on the call that evening and spent the night trying to troubleshoot by phone. No one had access to the switch except a technician on-site with a terminal, so I would tell him to type in a command and he would read the output back to me. This went on until the wee hours of the morning, and eventually I passed off the call to one of my graveyard-shift colleagues.

Sunday when I started work, I learned to my dismay that the conference call was still going on, and I was again needed on the call. I spent the entire night on the call. When I left, we were trying to get the hardware to replace the entire switch, not just the one card.

For all I know, that call is still going on. I have never been so glad that Monday is one of my days off.

The PC is back up and running again.

Now I have to come up with a new excuse for the paucity of posts here.

At work, the customer problems we work on are tracked by a ticketing system. New "trouble tickets" are automagically assigned to on-duty engineers in a sort of round-robin system.

When a ticket is assigned, the system fires off an email to whatever address we engineers designate for ourselves. Mine goes to my regular work mail, and a copy to my cellphone, in case I'm away from my desk when the ticket hits.

When I get a "you've got a ticket" mail, my email client is set up to play a sound file from Battlestar Galactica.

I sometimes wonder if I take my job too seriously. Or not seriously enough.

The PC is still dead-dead-dead, but now we know what specific part is dead; as I guessed, it's the motherboard.

Fortunately, a replacement can be had comparatively inexpensively, though I don't know how quickly. I could, in theory, be up and running again by Monday, but I'm not counting on it. More like Wednesday, I think.

I'm still limited to using the World's Slowest Laptop, which is only minimally functional for anything other than the apps I use for work... and even for those, it's a decrepit wreck. Nothing but the best for the employees, right?

I'll omit the separate rant about how a company might claim that we're the best network engineers in the world, but still treat us like wage slaves. Which I suppose we are.

I logged in to work today, only to discover that as of this week I have been tasked to support IP telephony on our 30,000-router network.

Once, just once in my career, I'd like to get training on something I'm supposed to support before I have to support it.

Because there's nothing that makes me feel like more of a schmuck than being being responsible for fixing things I don't know the first thing about, especially when it's urgent and important.

The old PC is still in the shop; due to the holidays, there was apparently a backlog of work for the diagnosticians.

I'm not too concerned. I've already decided to think of the box as dead-dead-dead, and have begun planning for a replacement. If anything can be salvaged from the old PC, well, that's gravy. But it is an older architecture — AGP rather than PCI type — so there won't be much that can be reused, apart from the hard drive and the memory (I think.)

Still, we're talking a minimum of three or four more business days — minimum.

My PC went belly up this evening. It powers up, but never gets to the BIOS, never boots up. I suspect the motherboard is toast, but geek that I am, I'm a network geek, not a PC geek, so that's only a guess.

I guess maybe I should call the Geek Squad. I wonder how long (and how much cash) it'll take to get the PC back on its feet.

Until then, no mail, no casual browsing. Good thing I have my employer-issued laptop here - it's the World's Slowest Laptop, but at least it works enough to let me post this.

I used to be an invenerate wargamer and collector of games, but those days are past, so I've lately been preparing a number of old and long-since disused wargames — most published in the 1970s and 1980s, of course — for sale on eBay. Part of the preparation process is a careful examination of each item I'm putting up for sale, and this evening I ran across something truly horrifying.

Anyone familiar with the name Avalon Hill will surely remember the game Kingmaker, which was a fairly lightweight and rather fun recreation of the English Wars of the Roses in the 15th Century. Originally published in '76, it remained a strong product and even made the transition into the PC game era, when many far more complex (and, I would argue, far better) games did not or could not.

Unfortunately for posterity, the box art shows some teens of the era enjoying the game, thus preserving a record of the fashions of the day.

Click for larger... if you dare face the horror.

Now, far be it for me to criticize the styles of the day. Lord knows, I was forced to wear a pale blue leisure suit at least once, and my prom tux shirts had more ruffles than Frito-Lay.

I have sincere doubts that very many board game geeks (or anyone dressed like those pictured) would ever be a political power player — a kingmaker — in real life. Sure, they probably went on to major in Poli-Sci in college (mine was History), but odds are that they spent the majority of their school years avoiding wedgies and building up a storehouse of tales to tell their therapists in the '90s.

Then again, have you ever seen those pictures of Hillary! in the '70s?

Saints preserve us.

Within minutes of reading this from Kevin at Wizbang!, I got one of the scam/spam (hereafter to be abbreviated "s[c|p]am") emails referred to.

Quechup: evil — read the above link for an explanation.

Via David Thompson: the coolest wind-powered sculptures you'll see all day... maybe all month:

If they were semi-intelligent robots, they would no doubt try to take over the world.

Fortunately, with turning radii of continental proportions, they are relatively easy to avoid.

Unless you walk like I do.

This week I took advantage of my days off (Monday and Tuesday) to rebuild my home network and multiple-PC setup, in part because it was a 5-year-old disaster area, and in part to accommodate my work laptop — to connect a monitor, keyboard and mouse on a semi-permanent basis, since a) I'm working from home until I am physically recovered, and b) I abhor my work laptop's keyboard and display.

Here can be seen a small portion of the disaster area — "Cable Hell."

So yes, maybe the re-org was a tad overdue.

Mycah, as usual, provided her usual high degree of assistance "supervision."

Fat lot of help she was. At least she didn't get in the way.

It's time for the Modulator's Friday Ark.

And the Carnival of the Cats this week is at StrangeRanger!

Discussing organizational "missteps":

Bob(22:38:53): it's as if have no clue how their decisions are affecting things
Bob(22:39:22): none at all, and if they took the time to ask around maybe they would find out
Russ(22:40:04): man, if I was king for a day
Russ(22:40:23): I'd go down in company history as Russ the Impaler

Note that I have never identified my employer, nor will I do so.

Finally, the work week is over. I spent an average of 6 hours a day on conference calls this week. If that wouldn't make you want to fling yourself off the top of a very tall building, you must have the patience of a saint.

Working, as I do, during the hours when many English-speaking customers have knocked off for the day and the Asia/Pacific sites have come online, I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to discussions I cannot understand.

A typical conference call usually runs along the lines of:

[random Chinese babble] traceroute [querying voices] router [something that sounds like Chinese but might be Martian for all I know] firewall [Chinese chit-chat, murmur, murmur] HA-HA-HA! [something that sounds like an argument] upgrade? upgrade? [cursing, sounds of a fistfight, maybe?] Oh, HA-HA-HA! [are they having a party in their network ops center?] Router! [questioning voices] protocol?

Then a lone voice in heavily-accented English, "So, what do you think?"

Repeat for six hours.

Sometimes it's Spanish. At least in Spanish I can follow along when they recite IP addresses. And sometimes I talk to folks in Australia. Our customers there are often a tough bunch to deal with, due to their serious expertise and the complexity of the networks we support there — we don't often get easy issues from Oz — but I can usually handle that, dialect differences notwithstanding. And those guys always seem to understand when I tell them it's past the end of my workday and I want a beer.

Well, as the song said, it's been a long, been a long, been a long, been a long day.

After being unresponsive to IMs:

getu 21:57:01: Yo.
[Nine minute delay]
Russ 22:06:03: sorry, man - jumping through my butt here
getu 22:06:17: ok
getu 22:09:36: Did your doctor okay that?
Russ 22:10:23: no - but my physical therapist said to give it a try

In a multiply-updated post, Glenn Reynolds talks global warming and the effect thereupon of congressional "private" air travel.

In the course of the post, Reynolds cites this statistic from Tourjet (which, as the name implies, is an aircraft chartering agency catering to celebrities):

The typical American is responsible for 10 tons of CO2 emissions annually through their direct energy use of home, cars and air travel, and about 24 tons of CO2 including their purchases, activities and the other services we all share throughout the economy.

By comparison, a Gulf Stream III business jet (10-12 passenger) from New York to Los Angeles will emit around 31 tons of CO2 during the 6 hour flight.

I'm no airplane expert (merely a well-informed hobbyist, you could say) but it seems to me that if a cross-country fight produces 31 tones of CO2, this means the aircraft would have to carry well over 31 tons of fuel, as not all the consumed fuel would be exhausted as CO2. I have a hard time believing that.

Turning to airliners.net we can see a bit of info on the weight of the Gulfstream III:

Empty 14,515kg (32,000lb), operating empty 17,235kg (38,000lb), max takeoff 31,615kg (69,700lb)

Quick math.... OK, so at the very most, the plane can carry 37,700 pounds (18.85 tons) of non-airplane weight.* That's passengers, luggage, cargo, and fuel. While that is a lot, it's not 31 tons, it's not all fuel weight, and not all of of the fuel would be used on a NY-LA flight, since the aircraft's range is something over 4,000 miles.

Unless, of course, there's more than one airplane called the Gulfstream III....**

It is hypocritical for "jet set" celebrities and politicians to blather about reducing greenhouse gas emissions while burning fuel by the ton, but accuracy counts, too. In this case, it's not quite as bad as it appears at first glance.

(So, I hope I got the numbers right....)

* It's just a guess on my part, but I think the difference between the "empty" weight and the "operating empty" weight might be the airplane plus a full fuel load, which would make the fuel capacity 6,000 pounds.

** Update: Errr... nevermind. I forgot all about the oxygen input into the chemical reaction, which would indeed boost the output CO2 mass to something rather higher than the carbon input into the equation. Good thing I don't make my living as a chemist.

Sundays are usually very quiet nights for those of us in the network support business. Super Bowl Sunday especially so.

So, I'm working from home, hoping to enjoy the game while I wait for the inevitable nothing to happen.

Then, ten minutes before kickoff — ten stinking minutes — something happens. Something big, for a big customer.

So now I'm on a 5-vendor, 25-person conference call trying to fix a problem in Spain. We're likely to go past midnight. No game for me.

I smell a European anti-fun conspiracy.

I've been toiling away on site maintenance issues... but not here. Which I should be doing, but that's another story altogether. I really do want to get a new design going....

No, rather, I've been assisting Ith at Absinthe & Cookies. I still have some tweaking to do, but go ahead and visit.

More physical therapy coming up shortly. I promise not to cry like a little girl.

When I get home I'll be taking apart the PC for some much-needed maintenance — installing a new video card (the original just fried) and a major memory boost. The darn thing is pretty tightly wired into "the lab," so it'll be a nuisance to extract.

With luck, I'll be back online before midnight. That is, I will be if I don't have to crawl straight into bed after the PT.

In the meantime, go read this piece on multiculturalism from the always excellent (though occasionally surreal) Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom.

Update: Aaaaaand... we're back.

OK, I could in theory, be doing this from my linux box (as I did when originally posting this) or even from my work laptop, but you'll just have to trust me on this one.

Sunday night, while I worked from my home office:

John (16:28:53): nothing like working on new years eve
Russ(16:29:11): nb gvbffffffffffffffffffffffffff
Russ(16:29:21): the cat is on my desk
John (16:29:39): lol
John (16:29:43): good stuff
John (16:29:53): nothing like making money with your cat typing for you
Russ(16:30:01): she wants treats, and won't stop pestering
Russ(16:30:04): me up[;------------po-0
Russ(16:30:17): me until I give her some
Russ(16:30:21): hjnyu
Russ(16:30:39): stupid cat

I arrived at work today to find a film unit, perhaps 20 crew and actors, occupying a largish portion of the office. They're filming a promotional spot of some sort, with a "24" theme involving our corporate aptitude at defeating virus threats.

Big whoop.

They'd better not point a camera at me. I can't afford to pay for a shattered lens. I wonder if their insurance covers that sort of thing?

Because of a recent merger, my employer is allowing all employees to select new email addresses. I'll probably go with the same pre-@ address I always used before I started working here.

But. . . I wonder if they'd mind terribly if I selected "WageSlave@[company].com?"

Perhaps "SplatterMonkey@. . ." would be more acceptable.

While trying to learn a new set of commands for looking at a rare piece of Bay Networks gear:

Russ(19:28:23): I think I just blew a synapse.
Russ(19:29:44): I had an easier time with Korean than with this.
[colleague](19:30:09): that's because talking Bay won't get you a date.

Truer words were never spoken.

Back in my days in the Silicon Valley, when I was an officer of the LUG out there, I used to have a passing acquaintance with a brilliant software developer named Hans. . .

. . .who I just learned was arrested a week or so ago on suspicion of murdering his wife.

Police: Books, Bloody Sleeping Bag Led To Reiser Arrest
Hans Reiser Charged With Murder

POSTED: 6:57 am PDT October 12, 2006

OAKLAND, Calif. -- The Alameda County District Attorney's Office charged Hans Reiser with one count of murder Thursday, NBC11 News reported.

Reiser was handcuffed and wore a red jail jumpsuit during his 2 p.m. Thursday court appearance in Oakland. Well-known defense attorney Daniel Horowitz appeared with Reiser as did attorney Bill Dubois.

Whoa.

It was half a dozen years ago, and I didn't actually know the guy at all except to say "hi" to — on the geek continuum, he was as far above me as I am above my cat — but I'm still pretty sure I could have gone rather a long time without needing to hear news like this.

I don't know anything about the case other than what's been published in the papers, but for some reason, the notion of an Alpha Geek (which Hans unquestionably was and is) committing a violent crime against a spouse just doesn't seem real. I'm not saying he did or didn't do it — "don't know" means don't know — just that it's counter to every geek stereotype you care to name.

Just to get you started: how many übergeeks have wives?

Just a test... nothing to see here.

I am an idiot.

My brother has been waiting years for me to make that admission.

This afternoon, not half an hour ago, I was logged into a customer's router. They couldn't get from the US to their router in the UK. I was wondering why the UK router wasn't advertising the host route for its Loopback via BGP.

If that doesn't mean anything to you, never fear. I'll not be long with this.

I had added a configuration command, so the router had to be advertising the address, and yet it wasn't.

Now, here's where the idiocy comes in.

"0.0.0.0" and "255.255.255.255" — do those numbers look even slightly close to being the same? You don't exactly have to be a computer geek to spot the difference, and yet I had used one instead of the other when configuring the router. Fortunately, after only five minutes of head-scratching, my error was easily spotted and corrected. But still... duh.

I'm just glad I didn't take down the customer's network when I made that particular goof. Maybe, just to maximise my idiocy, I can log in after hours and shut down their trans-Atlantic frame-relay connection.

Or better yet, in the middle of the business day.

In a technical workplace, it can sometimes be problematic to the only person who knows a particular technology particularly well — once you help one person fix their problem, they tell everyone, and soon everyone wants a piece of your time — but there are occasions when it can be good to be the go-to guy, in my case for ISDN and PPP.*

The class I was in over the past couple of weeks covered a wide array of networking technologies, and for most of the topics, one or two of the people in the class were already genuine experts, while the rest of us were only passingly familiar with the technology (I am pretty weak on switching, for instance.) For other subjects, most of us were well-experienced, but we paid attention to the presentations because there might always be something we might not have known. For ISDN & PPP, though, it happened that I was the only genuine expert in the class.†

On the day we covered ISDN & PPP, as the instructors (two of them) meandered through the presentation, I noticed some of my colleagues looking towards me, as if they were expecting me to nitpick the presentation. I did, after all, write the book on the subject.‡ At one point, one of the guys across the room IMed me (we all had our laptops), asking "is that right?" I looked over at him, caught his eye, and slowly nodded.

As the class progressed, I realized that more people were looking to me to confirm what was being presented. After the instructors made a statement, my colleagues would look at me quizzically... I would subtly nod.

Then one of the instructors noticed that every time she said something, people were looking towards me. Thereafter, every time a point was made in the presentation, she would look at me, with a metaphorical question mark on her face. I would nod, just a bit....

At the end, my fellow students all looked as though they were watching a ping-pong match.

Only later did it occur to me that I might possibly have been the first ISDN/PPP expert that instructor had ever encountered. At least she didn't try to drag me up in front of the class to finish the presentation.

* _{What ISDN and PPP do isn't important enough to explain if you don't already know what they are, but if you are using dialup, there's a 99.44% chance that your computer is using one of them to connect to the internet.}

† _{Or indeed, throughout the entire department. Which is a shame, really, because I work for a big telecommunications company.}

‡ _{OK, only two chapters (1, 2) of the book. But I did write them.}

So, it seems that spammers once again have made a nuisance of themselves, using whatever bots they use to hammer an mt-comments.cgi script I'd left laying around unsecured. My hosting company, the excellent LiquidWeb, did the smart thing and killed the account for a couple hours until the problem was resolved.

So now I'm back.

The Carnival of the Cats, which is usually a Sunday evening sort of thing, will be here Monday morning... because someone has to be the guy who works on Sunday evenings keeping the Internet running, and that guy happens to be me.

This is too cool. Keep clicking and zooming.

(Requires Shockwave plugin.)

Something is making the Movable Type comments script thrash the CPU on my web server. I presume it's %#^&@! spammers.

For the moment, I have disabled all comments. If you feel an absolute need to harangue me, there's an email link over there in the sidebar.

Update: It's good to be a professional troubleshooter - I may have solved my own problem. We'll see.

It's 2am, I'm still at work. Stupid customers.

This has been the kind of night that makes me wish the range was open 24/7.

russemerson: I'm trying to get a router to work properly
[friend]: ah
[friend]: fun
russemerson: it can be interesting.
russemerson: it's like being a detective, without the dead hookers.

At work today, after I solved in a matter of minutes a fairly s