So yesterday the school and part of the state lost internet. When your connected 90% of your life, you become attached to the ability to surf the web at any time. So the rumor is an upgrade was occurring in South Burlington and someone pulled the wrong plug, and then a fiber line in Chicago was cut accidentally. It’s a very crazy set of events I think.
This lead me to think about what happens if we have all our assets on the internet in one form or another and this happens. I know the helpdesk and a lot of other people weren’t able to get any work done because we didn’t have the pipes for around 3 hours. Our ticketing system for requests is on an outside server, which means we couldn’t do any of those jobs. We couldn’t send email outside the college which meant if someone needed our help with an online course we could do nothing. Also, since many of our website servers are on campus or in the state, our school website and the student portal wasn’t accessible to the outside world. Sounds pretty bad for business right?
The goods news is this kind of thing could only have happened in Vermont. We have almost literally two lines in terms of internet entering and leaving the state so if they go down the whole state is pretty much doomed. As we become more wired though we expect less downtime, so any downtime at all frustrates us to the max. It really is an addiction, and we must avoid it.
So, my first year at Champlain College is almost over. I’ve gotta say it went by faster than I expected. This place is great though. I love the class sizes (no larger than my high school classes), and all the professors know you.
I’m working at the helpdesk here, which I find to be an awesome experience. The pay isn’t amazing, but what do you expect? All the people are great though, I really like it.
Anybody need something to do July 11-13? Come to Solarfest. 3 days of music and renewable energy goodness.
Thanks to the wonderful people at the Champlain College computer helpdesk, the site is back! One of the techs has hosting that he rents out for cheap.
Ignore the whole splitting blog and frontpage apart. I’m just gonna write it all here. All pictures will be on my flickr account (which will be pro). I love Wordpress 2.5
Today was also my last day of college freshman classes. It’s been crazy how fast the year has flown by.
As I’ve discussed before, I want to make this homepage separate from my blog, and I’ve done just that. Frayedwires.com is going to be tech news, review, opinions and more, and Blog.Frayedwires.com is going to be my place to unwind. So for my rantings, head over to Blog.Frayedwires.com
Geez, it seems like it’s been one thing after another on this server. I don’t wanna talk about it, I just wanna move to dreamhost.
What I really wanted to mention was the fact that the 8/9 edition of All Songs Considered used Skype to talk to one of their correspondents. Clearly, NPR gets mad props for using this ip telephony/voip/peer to peer technology. Of course, the broadcast had a small glitch, which they left in the podcast (I don’t know about the radio) which was amusing. It was funny cause I had realized that skype stopped working because I heard the tell-tale noises that all skype users know and love.
What I realized was that Skype is, indeed, a viable option for television and radio. Look, it has it’s issues, but so do satellite phones, and satellite video. Why are the major broadcasters still using satellite video feeds when foreign correspondents could take a laptop and a DV camera and have improved quality. I’m always surprised at the clarity of Skype when it’s configured correctly. It sounds better than a regular phone line already, and goes pretty much head to head with an ISDN line. For less money than an ISDN line.
I’m not saying that the big people should switch, but it could be used when an ISDN line isn’t possible, or if the broadcasters can’t afford ISDN, etc.
Beware kids, major broadcasting companies are starting to use off the shelf products. What’s next, everyone will realize that Mac is a much better operating system for home users? 
Having a blast in VT for Solarfest 2007. Pictures over on Flickr
OK so there’s this company that does a pretty nice program called Missing Sync, which adds a lot of nice features to Palm users (they have a version for Windows Mobile, too) on the Mac. My issue with them? THEY MAKE YOU PAY FOR +1 VERSIONS OF THEIR PRODUCTS. What’s worse? They “say” they have an upgrade price: It’s sooo minimal that it’s like paying for the product twice, or in my case, three times. It’s retailed at $39.99, and their upgrade price is $24.95. What kind of obscure discount is that?? It’s crap. It’s stupid. And I’m not paying for it.
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Well, looks like I’ve got a few things to say. Some nerdy things, some otherwise.
Well the first thing is: i’m done with high school foreva!
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You know it’s funny, I’ve not even gotten the site back up on it’s feet and I’m posting the fun stuff. This post is partly a taste of what may become of the homepage of frayedwires: geek news, reviews, my opinons and cool software. Let’s jump into that.
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5/8/07 6:42pm: Oops, guess who deleted their whole website et all? Yeah, that’s right me. Luckily there was a daily backup from Midphase, so that saved my keister. Most of the site is back running, but all the places I’m doing upgrades are going to be updated ASAP.
I’m gonna clean up my server a little bit. Hopefully I don’t delete anything that’s required for the site to function properly.
I think most divisions of the site are either going to be run off wordpress or some sort of wiki depending on the needs of the pages. I’ll link to them on the sidebar when their ready.
All of that whilst I’m watching Battlestar Galactica. All the geeks watch it, so I figure I better get in the game. It’s pretty cool, CGI effects like Firefly(only the best Sci-Fi ever) and huge references to greek mythology.
Oh, and my plan for when I’m in college is for posts pertaining to it to have it’s own blog. And I’m still considering the whole front page is techie rest is personal bit.
–Nate
