Lost offline

Our internet connection was gone in work for several hours last Monday. In Ireland, many broadband connections had been upgraded the weekend before to go even faster. On Monday morning, this resulted in the connections for many businesses actually grinding to a halt! 🙂

All of us were greatly inconvenienced by this. Many rely on retrieving online reports throughout the day. However, as a web developer, I have everything I need set up locally for testing purposes so (luckily?) I can keep working regardless of whether I have an internet connection or not.

Well, that’s the theory. However, I quickly discovered that I use the web far more in my working day than I had ever realised. I used to think I spent the day coding and making web pages. Now I realise that the typical day goes more like:

  • code a bit
  • get an error / forget syntax / wonder about best practice
  • google for it
  • trawl through several results
  • fix the error / find the syntax / learn best practice
  • repeat until 5pm

What on earth did programmers do before the web came along? Don’t tell me they actually had to know stuff? 😀

I will be getting a bit more used to being offline for the next week or two. Sadly my beloved laptop, Smurf, is ill so she has gone to hospital. Dr Dell says that she is probably just getting hot flushes but she will need to be kept in for 6 – 7 working days! Aaaaggghhh! 🙁 At least I can share the family desktop, Elmo, in the meantime. Anything else would be unthinkable…

3 thoughts on “Lost offline”

  1. before google we had books. lots and lots and lots of books. plus things weren’t changing so quickly 🙂

    the eircom thing was daft. they knocked the system out mid-afternoon on saturday and didn’t tell anyone, didn’t even put a note on their site. they had it back by mid sunday, but they then forgot to give instructions for getting back online, which required a full reboot of all the relevent kit. i tried sunday night getting the office connection back up, but it wasn’t until monday morning that i realised i’d have to reboot everything.

  2. oh i have lots and lots of books too 🙂 it’s just that most of them are in my private library at home and in practice it would seem they are more to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling than reference material – how sad does that sound? 🙂

  3. it sounds like you’re a book fetishist 🙂

    to be honest, the problem i have is that the books i need are never where i need them when i need them – if i’m working at home you can be sure i’ve left them in the office, and if i’m working in the office, you can be sure i’ve left them at home. nine times in ten though i’m doing what you’re doing – forgetting the syntax for whatever langauge i’m coding in and having to google it up.

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