I was helping a guy on the UK team troubleshoot a major problem today since no one was around on that side of the pond any longer. All the others had been troubleshooting it most of the day. To set the stage, I don’t know much about their gear or their equipment or anything about their setup at all there.

He asked me to look at a firewall to see if there was an issue with traffic to and from an IP address. I happened to notice that the firewall management box I was connecting to was on a public IP address and the same network as the IP address he gave me to check.

I couldn’t reach the firewall management box at all and since I had already noticed the IPs were on the same network, I went to RIPE net’s whois and found out who the IP address block belonged to. It belonged to Easynet in the UK, which means that is the ISP.

So then I looked up the status page for Easynet’s services and found out that they were having a major outage.

Problem identified. It took me about thirty seconds.

The UK tech was amazed that I’d been able to figure out what the problem was in thirty seconds. It was something that various people had been working on all day.

But having seen a lot of every damn thing, it was just another day at work.

Funny when companies lay people off, they usually get rid of people like me. I’m expensive. But when you have a major production problem, I’m the difference between losing two days or losing thirty seconds.

And that’s the reason I am expensive.

I know where to draw the X.

Anyone who uses that “see more…” javascript on their site that inserts itself when you copy and then paste some text should be shot in the face with a planet.

Preferably Jupiter.

In various computer-related forums I visit, I’ve seen employees from several foreign (to the US) companies already attempting to move away from Microsoft products posthaste.

If you were anyone outside the US, why would you ever use an American bit of software again? I sure would not if I could at all avoid it as a foreign corporation.

Why do we demand flawlessness of character in writers especially?

There isn’t a truly great writer alive or dead who is a paragon of wholesomeness and good living. It just can’t happen.

First of all, to be a writer you have to be uncommonly stubborn. Writing is not a natural act, especially writing in volume. Uncommonly stubborn people tend to persist in inadvisable actions for longer than they should. This alone leads to many of the common flaws found in the character of writers.

Second, to be a great writer you nearly have to have lead an interesting life. An interesting life is impossible to have without making mistakes – sometimes very large ones.

Third, no one who ever wrote anything great did so by avoiding the tendentious or concentrating on the anodyne. Revelation and novel thought doesn’t emerge from a void – chances are the writer has explored a range of possibilities in his or her own life from which these insights came.

So give me my writers bloodstained, mud-blotted, buffoonish and antagonizing – just as long as their writing is interesting.