Head's Up

I'm going to be making some changes around here soon. I want to tweak the color scheme; the current palette is too gray. I liked it better before the internet blackout on January 18 when there was a lot more red and it was more vibrant. I'm also going to change the layout, with things pushed towards the edges of the screen and more open space in the center. That will let me play around with the font size a bit too.

Yes, to answer the question, something did bring this about. As my readers here know, I'm assimilated into the Google ecosystem of features including Google+. And, if you may not have heard, they've just triggered a large user interface redesign, featuring vast tracts of #whitespace. I won't be stretching the layout that much here but it will definitely fit better on high resolution monitors because who is still running at 640 x 480 much less wants a UI designed for it.

Decade-old memories

I passed up writing about a supposedly important anniversary last week. I didn't write about it because, honestly, it didn't really affect me.

I was in college at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the 2001 Fall semester. Since 11 September, 2001, was a Tuesday morning, I was in an early lab class. After lab I had the whole rest of the day open so I went back to the IEEE lounge in the basement of the engineering building. That's when another student, well known for being a bit of a cut-up, said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

Of course I said, "That's a really bad joke, James."

But I still walked to the computer lab down the hall to find out the story. I sat down at an open computer and thought about where to find the information I was looking for. You had to do that in those days. Remember that Google was only a few years old and hadn't overthrown the top search engines of the day, Lycos and Alta Vista. As this story was supposedly happening in New York, my first stop was the New York Times, the first New York-based newspaper I could think of. Their site wasn't available that day, my first indication that there might be something to this story. So I tried the Washington Post, our hometown paper there inside the Beltway. Also unavailable that morning. Now I'm thinking I need to try for a server well outside the supposed area. The LA Times was showing news from the night before. They hadn't even woken up yet to update their website. I finally hit upon the Tampa Tribune, who was both awake and online. That's when the towers started falling.

In the following years, many whitepapers would be written about dealing with surge capacity for news websites and many more about continuity of operations. The University's administration was castigated for not evacuating the school to which their response was, "Where are the students supposed to go? All the flights have been grounded and anywhere could have been a target." There was a campus-wide memorial on the 12th and classes were cancelled that day. Looking up and seeing military fighter jets on patrol instead of the normal passenger jet contrails was the eeriest part. We were concerned about reopening the world's oldest continuously operating airport.

Dungeon crawl? Not exactly.

Due to the current economic situation, network upgrades at work are a hard sell to make. It can be difficult convincing the powers that be to loosen the purse strings. Being a certified installer, as I am, lets the office counter most of the cost and scheduling objections that inevitably crop up.
I recently had the opportunity to install an extension to the fiber backbone in the building. It was just a simple bridge between two computer labs, but it got me into some of the locked cubbyholes in, and under, my office building.