Staticfree Blog

Low. I wake on a bed of cushions in a foreign room, but this is not abnormal. My body still feels last night's dancing. All sounds seem like my blurry vision, just awakening; still deafened from the thrashing guitars and wailing vocals of the 6 hour show. It was the type of music that's so loud you have to plug your ears to hear anything other than static and I enjoyed exactly half of it. If only I could regain half-again as much hearing to make up for my sacrifice.

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Awake, I wander off into the world, saying goodbye to my fellow revelers. These are friends that will last a lifetime, I will see them again and life goes on; I head into work. Outside is the start of winter. Dirty piles of what-was-once-snow are still on the ground from the recent blizzard: white beauty lost to modernization, lost to people, lost to time. Work, like everything in Boston, is a bus, a train and/or a short walk away. Thankfully for me, this ride will be shorter than my usual one-and-a-half hour commute; this place is not far from Cambridge.

Someday I'll be in the thick of it all, in the city. The suburbs leave me numb and escaping to other worlds, other homes, other cities. I want to live where I can leap up in frustration and land in a throbbing mass of static, chest-crushing bass and bodies. The requisite one-and-a-half hour submission of my body to the whims of the MBTA in order finally land, dulls the desired effect.

Missing one bus, I curse myself again for having forgotten my bus pass and fish 75¢ out of my backpack. The fare will be going up when the new year rolls around: a welcome holiday gift to us from the MBTA. I pull out my Palm to check up on my daily news, but I've fallen so far behind that there's no point in squinting at the small screen. I'll check it when I have more bandwidth, more time to kill and when I'm more awake.

A bus arrives and I head off into the city. They talk to you now, these buses. A small little box with a glowing screen dangles above the driver, listening to satellites in geo-synchronous orbit in order to figure out where it is. It then cheerfully tells an LED sign to display the current street intersection and simultaneously announces it on the overhead speakers. This is my childhood dream of the future, now and living. The bus arrives at the train stop, Porter, where I go underground. I check my cell and note that I'm losing wireless coverage. Only the musicians and masses can see me now, satellites will have to wait.

Protocol

Work is the usual fight over communication protocols. Group 'a' wants their product to talk with the server of group 'b'. To accomplish that, they must first negotiate a protocol which the code will communicate with. This is a common issue, so we decided to let someone help us out by using an existing protocol.

It's been long ago agreed that Jabber is to be protocol we're using. However, that's about equivalent to saying that "English" is the language that both Brits and Americans both use to communicate. This is true, in most situations there's a mutual comprehension: "where's the bathroom?" generally means the same in both countries. "I'm not wearing any pants", on the other hand, generally mean something entirely different. In the Real World™, people figure it out on their side. The Brits realize that the Americans are talking about "trousers" and are bloody-confusing sods. The Americans figure out that the Brits are talking about "underwear" and are turned on.

In our case, both parties need to be speaking the same dialect. A computer's ability to comprehend arbitrary cultural differences is about equivalent to your average, unprepared American businessman trying to grasp the subtleties of a Japanese business exchange. Both might notice there's something wrong, but by then you've either crashed or deeply offended your company's new Japan contact - neither outcome a pleasant one.

So I write the protocol for them. They tell me what they want, I give it to them in a nice, clean, packaged format. This would be great, except for another minor communication glitch: they don't speak the same dialect of English that I do. Oh, I love irony. I fire off some emails, asking them to clarify what they were asking. I can finally work on the guts of it all - the code.

In addition to negotiating protocols, part of my job on this project is to do a good portion of the actual implementation. This is where I get to sort through the mess of communication and tell our server how to respond to questions posed by stuff that I didn't write. The key here (that Microsoft is notorious for failing at) is not the code itself - that's the easy part - but the error correction. If something is wrong, you need to let someone know, otherwise both parties get exponentially confused as time goes on.

The classic Windows™ "an unexpected error was" is about as useful as catching on fire, spawning legs and leaping out the nearest window. Although the message seriously lacks the pyrotechnics and special effects, causing only severe user rage and confusion. It's worse with computer communication protocols, as you've got two dumb things banging against each other in hopes to accomplish some task.

Imagine, if you will, that the user is about as dumb as the computer they use. The night (and morning) of full-body sex they had caused the entire bedroom (complete with computer and keyboard cable) to shift a bit. They turn their computer on to see if the world has changed in the last 12 hours and it cheerfully exclaims, "KEYBOARD ERROR. PRESS F1 TO CONTINUE". Being as brilliant as the error message, they cheerfully press the "F1" key to satiate the other party's request. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is a world without error correction.

Nearly half of what I write deals with the errors, the stupidity. Too much stupidity in one day can get to you in the worst possible way, as I imagine any retail workers would vouch for. So I leave a bit early, dark skies and electric eyes sliding doors for me to leave. It's as if the office wants me to go.

Decompression

I walk to the T again. If even a small percentage of the money that went into the Big Dig went into the MBTA's pockets - and if the MBTA stopped fueling their over-hyped "silver line" with dollar bills instead of Diesel - the T might start to think about not sucking nearly as much as it does. Thankfully, I don't have to worry about that ever happening. Fares will increase and the only changes that will occur are new signs announcing the fare increases.

I get to the T, having to walk past my usual entrance to the "full service" entrance that actually takes cash. As I buy a token for a dollar, I consider purchasing a small investment in tokens while they're still cheap. I realize, though, that there's little point. They already rape you on token fares and the monthly subway passes can't be bought more than 5 days in advance. If they only spent the amount of effort taken to prevent you from slipping through the system's cracks in making the system better, we'd stop get dirty looks from NYC Metro regulars.

The red line takes me to the green line, where I get to attempt my way on a part of the system I've never used before - the B line. It's more crowded than usual, although I suppose a B line "usual" is different from a D line "usual". The train finally makes its way to my stop, I fidget with maps on my Palm, and start making my way to the coffee shop.

I see her in the window, guitar head bobbing to her rhythm. This is the beauty I had been longing for all day - genuine people, sitting in a genuine coffee-and-ice-cream shop, listening to live music. The protocol is understood and the actions on the client are simple: sit and enjoy. A hour or so passed with Ari singing self-written songs to a self-played guitar. If you listened carefully you could hear the backup guitar carefully enhance her melodies - a subtle twang that sounds Just Right. Some others there borrowed the mic and amp, sharing their talents with a receptive audience. Too soon it was over, and people started heading home. I picked up one of Ari's CDs to gift a friend, as viral propagation of her music doesn't work without a payload. She and I chat for a bit - I mention tech and she mentions music. Hopefully we can combine them in some meaningful manner that will bring more life to her website. That, though, is a thought for the future.

With the show over, I leave. Relaxed and rejuvenated, I make my way back to the T: back home. On the train, I sit at the back - no more seats - and pull out my laptop. A few eyes glance towards me and I hide mine in the screen, catching up on the day's news.