Perks

Ah how nice. One of the very few perks of my job is the random and varied ways I can connect to the internet.

I happen to work in the telecommunications industry as a technition. I have connected to the internet via Internal LAN, ADSL, SHDSL, Wireless, GPRS, WAP, Fast Data card and soon 3G.

I am currently testing a new DSLAM. For all the non telco-technitions, this is the beast that your ADSL (broadband) modem talks to so you can access the internet.
I think most of you would be surprised to look at one of these, they are remarkably 80's looking. Not very spectacular for the amount of data that passes through them.

Anyway

I am sitting here in the noisy fan laden room bored out of my scone. I have 8 circuits to test. I am on the third one of these. The first one has to be tested for an hour. The rest for 15 min each. So (insert wirring of my brain as it does basic maths, gives up and pulls out the calculator) joy of joys 2 and 3/4 hours of testing.
Testing involves my plugging a bit of testing equipment and making sure the big "OK" on the screen stays up for 15 min or hour or whatever. (No kidding the equipment actually says "OK")
Remarkably boring.
However I also need to test the internet. Hence the blog entry.
So for the next hour to hour and a half I will casually surf the internet. Seeing the world from the screen in front of me.

Well it's better than playing solitaire on my XDA.