Sneaker Net

Date: November 2, 2004
      I was having a fun day at work - listening to a marketing presentation on borrowed headphones so I could get up to speed on vocabulary at this new company where I landed on salary since I am working with memory and image sensors and camera guts. And, as I was watching the streaming video (and finding that a drawing I had done at AMCC 10 years ago that everyone had liked had managed to reappear in this presentation I am watching, in edited format of course, but so close----I was amused), I decided to download the PowerPoint file of the presentation (which was a talking head video - slide and verbal delivery). After all, plagiarism is flattery. The rest of the presentation was useful.
     
      Well --- that was a nice idea but from within my new company, I can see the external website, but I cannot download from it!
     
      They are paranoid about viruses - and someone must have run around waving their hands and screaming like an idiot when they were once attacked and they did all the wrong things to protect themselves. (Fixing the firewall might have been a better idea.) I see productivity impairment. Big time. (This is not unusual - several companies have gone haywire recently since they do not understand firewalls and get into trouble when those sneaky viruses and worms come calling. Overreaction. Need Norton Virus protection. Works.)
     
      I see a living sneaker net.

      For the uninitiated - that is where people haul data around on Zips, USB memory bugs, (it used to be floppies, which had better be obsolete) burns CDs and even DVDs. (Memory tapes I haven't seen in a dog's life.) In other words, moving data without going over the network and hence bypassing every virus detection piece of software on the firewall, such as it is.
     
      This was a bloody nuisance.
     
      So I merrily completed the viewing, after restarting the big Dell tower (PC of course) as the PDF download had hung up the system (four times - I am persistent), and went about my business.
     
      Of course, earlier that morning I had come in to the office to a system that did not start up when I hit the keyboard. It could not wake up. It was dead. Seems there was a power blip at 6 AM for some unexplained reason and I had to crawl on the floor on my hands and knees and find the power button. The keyboard and mouse cables have this tower strapped to the wall under my desk.
     
      The other day I had a man on the floor at my feet under my desk figuring out the headset plug. I refrained from comment. He's cute - I almost got down there with him.
     
      One of the things that was my business was to find datasheets of products in the family of the products I am working on. For educational value, comparisons, and to pick up terminology.
     
      Well, you guessed it, I went to the external web (where the presentations had been) and tried to download datasheets. External web mind. Our company.
     
      Nada!
     
      Oh that wasn't very nice!

      I even turned to the 17" Toshiba that I drag in everyday. It has an outside connection, of sorts. (I cannot use AIM instant messenger to talk to my son! This is how we were able to have me work and him be home. Which will happen again. I am planning on it.) I checked CNN (routine thing) - it's there. I went to the company website to download. I cannot even bring up the external web page for my own company!!!! Do not not ask me how they menaged to mess that up! Yikes.
     
      So, really frustrated now, I went to the hospital to baby-sit my son, who was not feeling well and who wants to be home and who missed Halloween (we did costumes and candy - he ate so much he threw up. His girlfriend showed up as a school girl and he put her over his knee. I have photos.)
     
      I went home at midnight. Staggered more like. I make up the hard fold-a-bed-chair and occasionally drop off to sleep. He throws tissue boxes at me. He's playing on-line. Ignores me until I try to shove food into him. I bring food, I fix food, I present food, I shove food in mouth if possible. We play airplane with oatmeal. He is 23 years old. Going on 2.
     
      I went to check email at home at this late hour and then planned to hit the datasheet and presentation downloads using DSL and my big 2GHZ dual-processor G5 tower.
     
      DSL was dead. Email was off-line. OK. Do not panic. My older son, the Programming God, whom I had called at 1:30AM the last time this was down, had taught me trouble shooting procedures. I did them. (I hate wires and goop.)
     
      I dropped the router out of the food chain and ran the big G5 tower Ethernet cable straight into the 2Wire modem. This disables the G4 tower and the old HP printer from the network.
     
      I unplugged the 2Wire modem and replugged it in. This forces it to reinitilaize itself.
     
      No joy.
     
      I rebooted the system, went to the network panel, killed the ISP number (supposed to be dynamic), re-power-looped the 2Wire, no joy.
     
      I went to bed. Sipping wine and sucking on dark chocolate. So much for my diet. My doctor will yell and I will be mad at myself later.
     
      In the morning, I repeated this mess (cycling the DSL, not the wine and chocolate), checked the phone line and the Ethernet line and found I still had a red broadband link light.
     
      I called SBC.
     
      It was 7AM and the doctor was to call between 8 and 9 about my son's biopsy, in case the cell counts include bad cells----- so it is an important call.
     
      SBC took 90 minutes, I went through 4 levels of techs (four tiers of support!) until we reached one capable of resetting the ATM network on their end - by this time they had changed my passwords so many times I no longer know what they are. Took the right tech about 30 seconds to fix this.
     
      I am up. I have a few hundred junk email messages and the Mac filters all but 12 of them. I sent angry messages to the vacuum center - my $1,000 Kirby is a week overdo. (It arrived just as I was leaving for work. How's that for weird?)
     
      Took 30 seconds for the datasheets and presentations to download.
     
      The Doctor called at 9 to say that the biopsy is tomorrow. Counts are at 1.1 and other counts stable. Good news? Bad news? Who the hell knows. I want my baby well and home.
     
      Good thing I have red wine and dark chocolate. Too bad it's morning.
     
      I got to work at 10:45AM and my rolling suitcase (purple) with the big hulking Toshiba. I am known to type at the hospital of an evening when my eyeballs are not falling out of my head. I am complete with my portable zip drive and a loaded disk.
     
      Ah, sneaker net. Works every time.