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Sometimes they snap their fingers...
BlogWork.
Recently my zaibatsu has decided to start communicating a social message. At the heart, the company sells networking hardware. But let’s face it, no one has ever gotten misty-eyed at the mere mention of Dense Wave Division Multiplexing.
No, but DWDM promises a commodity product: bandwidth. And you can sell the dream of what bandwidth enables:
- Download the library of congress in 40 seconds
- Be the woman with the world’s fastest internet connection
- Take an X-ray on a battlefield or in Siberia, and send it to the world’s specialist in NYC or at Walter Reed (er, maybe not)
When you see those opportunities, enabled by tons of bandwidth, buying big network hardware becomes very compelling. If selling big network hardware is your bread and butter, you want people to see as many of these “Oh Gee!” opportunities as possible.
Lately, the world has been singing Web 2.0 mantra.
I see Web 2.0 as the technological shift which is going to finish the work of the Modernist era: Institutions will fail ( church, nation states ), Science will accelerate, collaboration will flourish, and non-linear power-dynamics will erupt ( Yes, I did get a philosophy degree just to say that last one ). This shift is sneaking in under the cloak of “Wikipedia for the enterprise” or “Youtube on your network” but will erupt into thousands of skunk works and start-ups. It will truly change the model of production within the technological enterprise. I’ll stop before the zombies of Engels and Marx knock at the door.
But to make all that video-enabled, non-linear, collaborative formatting work, you need some serious bandwidth, and if you need that, you’re going to need network gear. It’s basically demand stimulation for the product we supply: like stimulating wars when you sell bullets. It’s a good story for selling and it’s a good technology inside.
I’ve been asked to be part of a team that’s deploying some of the technologies that create the “Web 2.0 experience” and have them enterprise-grade, in place, and working within less than 30 days. For anyone who’s worked within corporate IT, 20 days is an incredibly fast, mayhap impossibly fast delivery schedule.
So that’s what I’m doing at work.
At home I’m working on taking my 4th trigonometry exam and the final some 10 days later.
I did take a break from it all last night and watched the first disc of “Ergo Proxy” with Lauren last night. The first disc has been enough to make us ask “What the hell..?” and has filled out just enough story to make me want to get the next disc to see if it starts to make sense somehow. And what else can I say, Re-L is a hottie.
I also registered for two more classes from ACC in the fall semester: Calculus I and Latin I.
The calculus class is something I wanted to take last winter, but was so rusty I had to take a few preparatory laps before jumping into it. And Latin, well, I had always wanted to learn it. Even back in high school ( I was pragmatically steered towards Spanish ). After some 13 years of The Bobcat and my’s joking about the travails of Caecillius and Cerberus being in the mensa, I will at grasp this notion. I hope to do some fun programming in Cocoa and / or Ruby as I learn about it. The old languages are very rigorous and rule-based, it should be interesting to program around that.