Behind the scenes of the Internet...

A couple of weeks ago, I went on a quest with some of the engineers with whom I work.

I'm not an engineer but I love a quest and that's why this little adventure was fun. We went to look for a VHUB, which is a virtual hub site. Here's a technical description of a hub site: Hub sites are way stations on the routing patterns that our bits and bytes take to get over the Intertubes to go from the point of origin to our devices. Typically, a hub site is a physical hut and could be as big as a nondescript building that we pass each day without noticing. But a VHUB is virtual. A piece as small as a shoe box could serve the fiber optics for 20,000 wireline internet customers.(See my post on Data Movers and the Pipes that get our information to us for more details on hubs, pipes and how our Facebook posts, Tweets and Instagram photos get to us.).

But we weren't as interested in the VHUB as we were in the power supply and the transponder and how that power supply talks to the VHUB. It's strange that these contraptions talk to each other, but they share a lot of important information.

A good specimen of the power supply, so we thought, was going to be near Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. The power supply was supposedly at such and such address. There we went and in a typical downtown building, part residential and part office space, a number of small businesses were tapping away on the keys in the midst of a normal business day, using the bits and bytes that we are powering.

I peered through the fuzzy glass of a closed office door. A pile of cash was laying on the table. I point out this detail of the cash because, in this day and age, when it feels like all of our transactions are taking place in this semi-fictional space, where large quantities of money are literally swept from one account to another over the electronic Intertubes, it seems strange to see cash. It seems strange to imagine these brick and mortar places where cash changes hands. Where cash could occupy an entire table.

I can't remember the last time I paid for something in cash. Here we were doing some maintenance on the Intertubes so that people can sweep large amounts of money to each other electronically, virtually, and there was a pile of cash on the table.

I paused to reflect on this detail of the cash while we waited for Ricardo, who works for the real estate company as a gopher, and he had the keys to the office where the power supply was. 20 minutes later he came from another address downtown and opened an office door for us.

"No, this isn't what we're looking for. It's a box about yay big." We gestured the size and shape of a power supply. "Aha," Ricardo retorted and took us to the basement. To a broom closet, really, in the remote corner of the building. Deep underground. In the bowels of the city. Surrounded by brooms, mops and ancient office equipment, we found the object of our quest. With some fiber optic and coaxial cabling strewn around in random fashion, we found our power supply in a strange home. And it was blinking.

Imagine 4 engineers standing around a box with a blinking red light as if it were a bomb. And they were trying to defuse it. With deep concentration, theories were abounding. There were lively discussions of Ohm's Law. Wattage. Voltage. Is it a 3 amp or 7 amp power supply? Will this power supply talk to the VHUB? What's up with that blinking red light?

None of the engineers knew what the blinking meant. But I did. My dad had asked me about the blinking red lights on the power supplies, and several months ago I had asked around to figure out the answer. Failed inverter test. Temp sensor not working. A pile of old insulation was laying on the power supply enclosure. At least the thing was well insulated. But here we were and Ricardo said that red light had been blinking for several years. Since they installed it, he said.

And it seems strange. The critical information for some 20,000 households was just sort of hanging in some limbo because of a blinking red light that nobody knew what meant.

I really wanted to see that VHUB. I'd seen what they look like in a brochure but I wanted to see what it looked like in its milieu. Deep under the ground, it would require another field trip. We could either open the manhole cover and descend into the bowels of old time Seattle. Or we could take the tour that goes through underground Seattle to find the VHUB. Did you know that there is another Seattle right underneath the Seattle we currently know? Maybe they'll build another Seattle on top of this Seattle someday.

Behind the Scenes of the Internet: Infrastructure engineers looking at a power supply powering a device providing fiber optics to 20,000 customers. At least it's well insulated. 

Do we really need an app for that? I still do that manually...

Whenever somebody mentions to me that they have a new app to do some task for them, I can only think of a conversation from the cult classic The Big Lebowski between Brad (played by the late and very, very great Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and the Dude himself. 

Brad: Interactive erotic software. The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic!

The Dude: Yeah well, I still jack off manually.

And I suppose I'm like the Dude. I still do things manually. Most things, really. 

The most used app in my family is probably the Peterson Bird Guide app for birders (great app by the way), so I'm not totally anti-app. And there are some things I don't do manually, though I'm perfectly OK with looking up birds in a hardcover book. 

I've spent a long time questioning our app culture, but a line I saw recently really solidified some of my harsh feelings towards our app-centric culture. It was really paradigmatic of how we have sort of degraded as a society: "I have an app to tell me when it's raining. How cool is that?" Well, actually, it's not very cool. Because if you need an app to tell you if the sun's shining, you're probably missing some real important things in life (you know, like going outside). Bob Dylan called it pretty well in 1965: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." 

When I lived through the first dot com boom of the late 90s, early 2000s, the most lasting line I ever heard was from a fat cat wealthy tycoon (actually he wasn't really a tycoon or a fat cat, but he was definitely living the good life and it was a life to aspire to). His wise line, something I'm still trying to aim toward was about cell phones. At that time, when cell phones (you know, the old flip phones) were still a novelty, people would conspicuously talk on them in public places (we still do, but it's becoming more ingrained into our culture). The cell phone was like a status symbol to look important because you had another conversation that was more important than being present with those who were with you. This almost tycoon (but too wise to be a tycoon) told me: "Kendall, the goal in life is not to be one of those guys standing around with a cell phone in public places. The real goal in life is not to have one of those things." He was right. Hopefully, I'll become so important and lose some of my insecurities enough so that I can ditch my phone and become 100% present in what I am doing. I'll know that I have made it in life when I can ditch my phone. 

In English: "Put your cell phone here/The first to use it pays the bill." (Spanish grammar nerds, note the spelling mistake.)

I grew up with Star Wars and so I like technology. I like the idea of us as a species going to space and exploring other planets and using technology to live longer and better lives, but I feel like we've lost the story a bit. A line that made a big impression on me in college was from an interview with George Lucas. He said, "Technology is only a tool." In Lucas's case, technology is a tool he uses to tell a story. It's interesting that his worst movies were made when he forgot that important life credo, when his movies became about the technology itself and not about the story. 

My cautionary tale for app makers and app users is that we should spend more time thinking about the story, our story. What are we really using that app for? Do we really need an app for that? I use the map apps that everybody else uses and they're fine for getting the general direction of where I am going, but I'll do a little jig in my car the next time (the first time really) that one of those navigational apps actually gives me the right directions to where I'm really going. 

I'd like to live a good life. I don't need an app for that. 50 years from now we're not going to regret not having invented an app for X. We'll regret not having cured cancer, stopped the spread of malaria, or having figured out how not to completely destroy the place where we live.