600 Words of Recent News

I flew to North Carolina to assist in the turn-up of two 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) connections between two financial data centers. I started the push for a 10GE testing solution at my company and have been the product manager on the project (through no less than 3 inceptions) since 2002. The turn-up itself was very easy, since were we essentially just testing ~7 km of fiber optic cable running a DWDM wavelength through a couple of network elements and actual Ethernet traffic had very little to do with the test. The main difficulty, besides coordinating with the other data center with people who could not follow directions, was that the work officially started at midnight Saturday night. With preliminary work and equipment setup, I was actually there assisting the customer starting Saturday evening and did not get to bed until after three o'clock in the morning in Sunday. Overall, it made for a very long weekend and I did not fly home until Monday morning. In addition to the useful field experience that I could apply later that week (see below), I learned that Cracker Barrel really is not all that it is cracked up to be.

On the following Thursday, I returned to the east coast, Atlanta this time, to assist in the creation of test procedures for the type of turn-up that we performed the previous weekend. And by assist, I mean do it on my own, since very little constructive input or feedback was provided by the customer. An important part of my job is to make my customer's job easier, and it is very frustrating, inefficient, and costly in time and travel expenses when customers are unable to help me help them. This is hardly the first, or the last, time when I encountered a situation in which I knew more of the technical details of testing than the customer. After all, I was there to be a technical expert and consultant for 10GE, but so much of what I do depends on the specifics of the application, that I need good, complete information from the customer so that I can be helpful. Fortunately, this particular Layer 1 application is so basic that my questions were few and easily answered. Since there are no switches or routers involved, we can sidestep all the complexities associated with MAC and IP addresses and protocols.

I returned to find myself called to the Superior Courthouse for jury duty the following Monday. Given my low juror group number, I had expected this and was warning people for weeks. This was not the first time I had been called for jury duty, but the first time I had ever set foot in the actual courtroom. I lucked into being picked as an alternate and on Tuesday, I became an official juror when one of the other twelve had to be excused "with cause." Fortunately, it was a quick civil trial and we handed in our verdict on Wednesday morning. I will not go into details, simply because I cannot think of a way to make them interesting, except to say that our decision was unanimous in favor of the defendant, a large national retailer and against the little old lady who was knocked down in their store. While I am not a defender of Corporate America, we simply did not see any negligence on their part that would make them responsible for the damages. I used the new Winchester extension of Light Rail, which dropped me off right at the courthouse and made for very pleasant commuting.