james_nicoll

My Internet in Nowhere-Near-Canadialand was down this morning, too, and it's still sluggish. Is there some bigger issue going on? Perhaps the central Internet office is on holiday? [1]

[1] I feel the need to preemptively announce that I am joking with this.

Internet Volcano!

It's not impossible -- basically if one of the major trunk lines is having issues (I recall a case of backhoe fade that UUNet's fiber lines suffered in the late 90s, which took most of Eastern Canada offline for a day), relatively geographically remote areas could feel the impact.

Or it could be simply that James' readership is large enough that two completely unrelated events are occuring roughly in the same time span. It's not like Rogers offers a five nines uptime guarantee on its dialup service.

I remember VIA or CN had a talent for cutting cable while working on the rails.

On a smaller scale, one of the now-local-to-me backhoe operators was so famous for this that the phone company repair crew made him wear a length of copper cable around his neck to remind him to *check for underground cables*.

Before he finally left for other employment, he'd cut:
the water main
The phone lines (twice)
The overhead power lines
And almost broke the gas line, but we caught him in time

Or it could be simply that James' readership is large enough that two completely unrelated events are occuring roughly in the same time span.

{creepy_stalker_mode}

Everything James and I experience is cosmically related! You can't prove otherwise!

{/creepy_stalker_mode}

Oh yeah: Here's a graphical representation of the internet. All of it. (well, all of it as of Jan. 2005)

Is there some bigger issue going on?

It's that Icelandic volcano spreading its no-talent ash-cloud across the Net. I think it's pronounced something like "I-FAIL-a-lotta-YO-Kibo".

In the late 80s I attended a discussion at AT&T where they statedthat the biggest hazard for communications in North America was the fact that on any given work 10,000 men and women were operating backhoes.

There are probably more now.

The speaker commented rather enviously that one of their competitors had arranged to run cable in gas line right-of-ways, and thus had fewer problems. Because when people see a sign that says "Contact the phone company before digging" they may ignore it, but when they see a sign that says "Before digging call the gas company" they tend to pay more attention.