Well, after my well-deserved honeymoon in New York, I’ve come back to the real life and its nuisances. I was supposed to work with some documentation, but an unusual set of circumstances has prevented me from doing it. First, I’ve been put to work in a proof-of-concept project to develop some custom parsers for an unusual report format that some AXE10 routers spit. Meanwhile, all hell breaks loose in London due to the bombings, which means a lot of stress is put on phone communications: while everybody is busy contacting their dear ones to check that they are safe, the phone companies experience what is dubbed a mass call event. Normally, mass call events are anticipated (for example, when U2 sell tickets for a concert or the voting for the Big Brother finals) and telcos deal with it with the so called call gaping, which means that at your local switch you get a busy tone x% of the times without even trying to contact the destination switch.
But yesterday, telcos could not expect the avalanche of calls and the switching routers were not pre-programmed for the call gaping routine. So that’s when enters into the scene another mechanism that different telephony management software (like the one that we do at our company) names in a different way, so that Government and Emergency Services get priority placing their calls. Unfortunately, yesterday was a good real life test of the software, let’s hope it performed well everywhere.
On to another topic: I was curious and decided to check the stats for this and other websites I manage, and seems like I’m recovering the traffic that I used to have a year or so ago, before I coulnd’t allocate any time to their maintenance. One of the referrers was new to me, and I was delighted to see a weblog which I suspect is written by a friend and former cow-orker of mine: he speaks about Blackberries, about commuting from Mataro… even his name matches. Will contact him to see that he is really him before posting an inflamating comment ;) I can’t help but wonder at the title of his blog, “Helado de Can”, which knowing him (a-ha) I suspect it’s nothing but some kind of occult reference or hieroglyph. I already have a theory at the intended meaning.
Coincidentally, I have begun looking into acquiring a Blackberry (the sidekick is not distributed here yet, to the best of my knowledge), but I’m not yet convinced that 25€ a month are worth it. Of course, Lluis mentions an application for it that I hadn’ t considered, which is mobile blogging. If only the PSP had a web and email app! While I was in NYC, I bought one for my li’l bro. He comissioned me to test it throughly before flying back to Barcelona, because once here the guarantee will be very difficult to exercise (the PSP won’t be distributed in Spain until September at least, that’s why I bought one in NY). I considered getting another for me, but decided not to, I’m not enough of a player to justify the acquisition, even though I admit it’s a very nice machine. I’m more the target audience of a PDA or PocketPC type device, myself.