I have weird roommates…

It’s weird to to see that the last time I posted on this blog was September 2008, And then the post before that was May and I was a Freshman.  It’s easy to say that again, like my End of Freshman Year post, the time has been flying.  Now I’m in the second semester of my Junior year and it doesn’t seem to stop.

That’s not to say that the work is getting to me, it really isn’t.  I could say that I am enjoying the work, but really who ever enjoys work?  We just get through it, day by day.

Well, from Freshman year to Junior, I went from living on campus, to a place in South Burlington (or SOUTHEast, if you’re asking my roommate), to a place in Williston, and this summer I’m sure we’ll move again.  That seems to be how it goes.  A change in living is always nice.

So, heres to another few years of silence on this page (except for my Tweets, they keep going on my Twitter page and in the Tweets category).

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.