I had been meaning to write about this for a while but didn’t find a suitable occasion (don’t I always claim so?). Anyway, I got out of bed quite early in the morning (thanks to my new found passion that makes me be at a given place before 8 am), browsed through some usual pages (this, that, this and this) and left for school around 7.50ish. Some time between then and next 10 minutes, (in Jim Oliver’s words) somebody took the Inter out of Internet

These are the times when a Con feels utterly helpless but the early morning users were kind enough as I searched for usual suspects - broken cable, loose contacts, etc. Basically, we were reduced to watching only such pages that had mtu.edu as part of their domain name and since this intranet itself is so darn big, it felt to many as nothing had happened. When none of these resolved the issue, I resorted to use our (Michigan Tech’s) chat service (based on Jabber Protocol) - knowing some good people got me the information that pretty much entire Upper Peninsula of Michigan (we call it UP for short) was out of internet and some cell phone service, and more importantly, ETR (Estimated Time for Repair) was not known. Hmm, what does one do on such a day? Or, to be more preicse, what does one not do on such a day??

Since recent past, I have been involved in two of the quite widely practiced e-phenomena. No, I am not talking about p**n nor do I have an account on MySpace, but more gentle forms of disucssion boards: FaceBook and Orkut. What are these, you ask? In a nutshell, these are like bulletin board like services where you post profiles, make new friends, find old ones and chit-chat. Former is tied to University students whereas the latter is pretty much universal. I will write about Orkut as I am slightly more familiar with it than the other one, but if you are a vice-versa character, just replace Orkut with FaceBook and everything will still look meaningful. These two have reduced the the introductory conversation to something like…

Hi, saw you on Orkut the other day. Didn’t know you were there - how long have you been a member of it?

This, instead of the more usual, I saw you at that place and it has been a while since we met. How have you been? If people know each other pretty well and one of them isn’t a member for some reason, you would hear something like

You are not on Orkut? What’s wrong with you?? Think you are too smart to spend a few minutes in knowing your friends???

I have gained a lot from my (free) membership on this community - have found interesting people who are turning into my new friends and at the same time, have found my buddies from high school and undergraduate days - some after a gap of nearly 10+ years. But few minutes that people think they are spending aren’t really minutes anymore. Messages that get posted are no longer Hi, how are you? types but rather lengthy ones - often discussing someone’s past, someone’s present, someone else’s future. Some people have broken up while some bravehearts have taken the bold step of proposing to their sweethearts and some of these sweethearts even have said Yes. Good for them and may God bless. By now, you are thinking like this guy gotta be kidding. But let me explain a certain event that took place a while ago.

Some of my evenings are spent in working with people (in the local community) to fix their computer related issues and once, three friends of mine (who share the same apartment) called me to look into their day-long no-internetness. First thing I hear from one of them is

Internet thoda fix kar do yaar, aaj din bhar orkutting kiya nahin - haath mein khujli ho raha he

In English, please fix this network thing, haven’t done Orkutting the whole day. My hands are itching. I tried some low/hi-tech methods (pinging, etc.) but soon realized that the ethernet cable was, accidentally by the person who cleaned the apartment, plugged into the wrong slot in the router. When I told them that it was a simple fix, you should have seen the look on their faces. A dull, sober look transforming into a bright, cheerful one on one side, while anger spewing out of (two guys) eyes towards the poor soul who cleaned the apartment. Within moments, they ran around the apartment, fired up their babies (I mean laptops) and started Orkutting.

That was only for couple hours (and in just one apartment) and those guys felt they hadn’t Orkutted for a whole day. I bet they (and many more people) felt their entire body itch today when hardly any communication went out of Michigan Tech, felt like their laptops/desktops were no more than unnecessary weight. I would be cheating myself (and you) if I said I didn’t miss Internet (or the lack of it) and a bit of Orkutting. While people were missing Internet, Cell Phone service, etc. for about 8 hours, other things happened too - but I will reserve them for a later entry. Lot of people worked their a** off to figure out where the problem was and worked tirelessly to fix it. By the time I returned to apartment, TBS was re-airing the Black Out episode from F.R.I.E.N.D.S. (call it co-incidence!) and following (often updated) message was waiting:

Off campus digital circuits unavailable »

Item Created: 08/03/2006 at 12:13 a.m. by Brenda Helminen
Last Updated: 08/03/2006 at 4:07 p.m. by Brenda Helminen

Status: Open
Type: Central IT Services

Network traffic to MTU and other UP sites (NMU), some selected campus DSL service, one MTU videoconferencing circuit, and GSM cell phones from CellularOne and AllTel are reported down. Older TDM cellphones are working. We are suspecting a fiber cut somewhere in the UP. AT&T/SBC/Sprint/ALLTel/CellularOne have been notified. Local, long distance, and E911 telephone calls to/from campus and around the U.P. ARE functioning.
Outage began at 7:57AM Thursday, Aug 3, 2006

UPDATE as of 9:37AM:
SBC has been notified by Norlight of Wisconsin that they suspect a fiber cut in their plant. No location is known yet, and we have no estimated time for repair.

UPDATE at 9:40AM:
Merit has word back the break is near Coleman, WI, not ETR at this time.

UPDATE noon:
Still no ETR, but we do know that there is a splice crew on site, and the construction crew has been sent home.

Update 4:05PM:
The fiber cut has been repaired. Off campus traffic is flowing. Cell service has returned.

That meant, the Inter was part of Internet again Following a recently found philosophy (or a new way to phrase an old philosophy),

Life may not be the party we hoped for, but we might as well dance while we are here…

me and some of my friends went about our business/work as if world hadn’t come to an end. Well, some of you (I know who you are though) might be wondering (and laughing out, rolling on the floor, probably) about a miserable day many of us had here in the UP and saying

Poor Yoopers, can’t even have proper internet and cell phone service…

Just so you know, we (The Yoopers, natural and adopted alike) don’t laugh when you folks suffer blackouts, experience snail-paced internet speeds, roast like a toast under scorching sun and/or when you use boats to cross roads instead of walking, etc… It’s about time you started returning the favour(s)….