Well its been way too long since I last blogged, let alone checked out every one else’s blogs. But life’s been a little hectic lately and there’s been no time. So I trust that you will be reading this thinking ‘thank god hes updated.’ Well, the thing is that nothing really exciting has happened, just very busy, especially at work.

The past two weeks have seen me literally headlong into comms boxes and server cabinets…Trying to make sense of the twisted mess of cables, routers and other network equipment. But there again, who can complain about it when at the end of the day, you see that the fruits of one’s labour have positively paid off. A subtle change of cabling, some reorganisation and a little TLC goes a long way to bringing a sense of order to an otherwise neglected area in most retail outlets.

The trouble with locations such as these, is that it only takes one sloppy contractor to set a perpetual wheel of shabbiness in motion. If everyone took pride in their work, it would be a lot less common to see messes like this….

Some comms cabinets resemble a square bowl of blue spaghetti rather than the reality of highly sophisticated data carrying cables, managed electronic data switches and routers.

Routers are an interesting animal. Depending on where you live, they are rooters too. Routers/routers… Same thing. Do you root data or do you route it? Well its one of those things isn’t it. In the US, do you travel on route 66, or root 66? Do carpenters root the legs off tables or chairs? Do you find yourself on route to the airport? Now every Aussie would understand this dilemma. If I said I was rooting some sheep from one side of the road to the other, you would be forgiven for thinking me desperate or mad (or both). But if I was rooting traffic??? Now that’s just strange, no matter how you look at it…

So anyway, cables can resemble spaghetti, or a work of art, depending on how much effort you put into their um, routes. You see, there is an art to rooting, or should I say, routing. An art form that is both evasive and seemingly hidden from the modern routing bible. Rooting really is a dark art... That is to say, you either can or you can't get rooted. And clearly as you can see here, very few people are good rooters. The cabinet above, is clearly not well rooted, while the one below is rooted suficiently well to carry the outward semblance of order. You see, they are the same cabinet. Before and after.

The art of routing cables may be similarly compared with flower arrangement. The main difference is perhaps the non-similarity in organic structure or purpose. Perhaps the perfectionist cabling guru type, are on a life long search for existentialism in a similar way that a Japanese Samurai would apply the “Zen” of flower arrangement to his quest for enlightenment.

Maybe our state of being is reflected in the quality of our workmanship. At the very least, it must speak of our commitment to the task, assuming that our skills match the tasks requirements for an orderly outcome.

If it were not so, everything would end up rooted instead of routed and lets face it, I would rather send a bunch of network cables to my mother than a poorly arranged bouquet of rancid flowers from an incompetent florist on Mother’s Day. Having said that, as illustrated in the following rack, it can be near on impossible to get any sense of order in a comms cabinet without completely starting again with more appropriate length cables. Unfortunately, you cant just take the systems off line (without upsetting the network administrators.) When you are forced to make do with less than adequate resources at your disposal, all you can hope to do is your best under those circumstances. It is difficult to polish a turd.

So I suppose that you're wondering how the cows come into this? Well no post would be complete without the obligatory references to the humble cow. Here's a herd of cows playing footy! I think the brown team won. Either way they have been routed to this football field rather strangely, presumably to graze on the rare green grass of this rather dry area of Gippsland.

Enough of my ranting for now… Hope you’re all in good spirits and have a fantastic week!