January 17, 2005
Tiredblogging
A little while back, a couple of major bloggers posted from tire shops via mobile connections. I'm sitting on top of a set of tires, and connecting via GSM GPRS thru a cellular phone cabled to a laptop. This is part of my regular work test rig, but right now the laptop sees the phone as just another modem.
In order to minimize the number of customers affected, it is common practice thruout the mobile telephone industry for major work which requires a service outage, either of one site or an entire network, to be done late at night. Tonite a software upgrade was loaded into the computers at every cell site in our network, and I just had to drive a loop thru part of the market (one of the engineers did the other half) to make sure that the sites (or at least enough of them to be reassuring) came back up and are functioning. Usually they do, but when they don't the people doing the work (tonite it was done from Chicago) want to know promptly.
The drive itself was routine, but a couple of things I saw were worthy of mention. A major local construction contractor located by the expressway is advertising for carpenters. This is not prime construction season; business, for them and their competitors, must be good. An undeveloped parcel of land near the end of a major business area has come on the market. The sign announced "Minimum Setbacks - Fast Approval". Government policies can, it would appear, effect real estate real estate values.
Posted by triticale at January 17, 2005 01:58 AM