Saturday, January 6, 2007

WWJBHD?*

CNN has been covering an avalanche in Colorado. No one was hurt, a road blocked.




When my wife and I drove across country in search of the Holy Bar & Grail, one thing we both agreed on was that wherever we stopped for the night, there would would be broadband. Wireless wasn't at the top of the list because, broadband plus an airport equaled instant wireless anyways.

But broadband was non negotiable.

I even flirted with the idea of getting me an EVDO router, and using my car as a link to the interwebs (straight EVDO card wouldn't work, because, well, we're Mac people). That was to nerdy, so we went with a Sirius radio subscription. The good part was that driving across the country, we did not once miss our goal. Every hotel, from the east, to the midwest, to the flat states and beyond had broadband.

I came across this site, which maps wireless internet nodes. For some reason, it seems a more up to date snapshot of where people are. After all, those maps that show (famously North Korea) who has lights and who doesn't are, well, dated.



I like complex systems. My wife and I maintain three (two in the garden, and one in the house). It's fun to watch them grow. We get hours and hours of pleasure from our complex systems (Fuzzy, Wuzzy and Dover, are their names). The problem is complex systems take alot of work to maintain. Last week Dover caught a bug, and was down for almost two days. Poor Dover. But he got better.

Recognizing that the more complex a system, the less fault tolerant it is, is the key to maintaining them. Just good sense.

It will be interesting to watch this map grow. Or shrink.




*"What Would Jeff Bezo's Head Do?"

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