The 9th floor of The Standard located in Greenwich Village of New York City. Pre-pandemic. I wake up mid-day and a full-sized giraffe stands in the corner of my hotel room. The view of mid-day downtown Manhattan is obscured by a full-sized living breathing giraffe. This animal is staring at me. Blink. This situation makes… More
Nesting and Networking
Three years ago at the Heathrow airport, the handle on my roller bag snapped, and my luggage leaped to its death on a series of stairs. Trauma is a good source of writing inspiration as evidenced by the subsequent article that documents my obsessive-compulsive travel habits.
One other habit I neglected to document was that whenever I arrive in a new hotel room, I follow the same pattern. I examine the room and assess the view, the bed, storage, and the bathroom. I sigh when there is no bathtub; I do a little dance when the minibar has Pringles. After an assessment, I immediately unpack. No matter the degree of jet lag, I unpack.
Nesting describes this compulsion. As an introvert who is deeply concerned with the precise location of all my stuff, the process of unpacking gently places me in my temporary home.
Unpacked? Good. Not done, yet.
Next up, I assess the network. Once I jump through whatever login hoops the hotel has presented me, I run Speed Test to assess both ping, download, and upload speed. This quick test gives me a high-level assessment of my potential network comfort while in my temporary nest. Worldwide, wireless networking and networking has vastly improved over the last five years. Not only do I now expect download speeds of 10+ megabits per second (Mbps), it’s usually much faster.
In the infrequent case that something smells off in the network, I perform a deeper triage. My old lame move here used to fire up terminal and type “ping cnn.com.” The new hotness is MTR. Written in 1997, MTR combines the functions of traceroute and ping and “probes routers on the route path by limiting the number of hops individual packets may traverse, and listening to responses of their expiry.”
It looks like this:
What you see in the image is both the route to Yahoo and all the results of pings to all of the routers on that path. O
Most often, Speed Test tells me what I need to know about my network, but when something is off either in my temporary or permanent nest, MTR gives me a clearer picture of my network situation.
You can install MTR via brew. Once installed, here’s a handy bash alias to fire up MTR with minimal terminal fuss:
alias netwtf='sudo /usr/local/Cellar/mtr/0.86/sbin/mtr -n 8.8.8.8'
A Small Grey Leaf
At the bottom of an individual post on this site, you might notice there is a small grey leaf. No one has ever commented about this leaf. No one has ever asked about its significance. It’s a pleasant quiet ending to a post. There was a time when this version of the site was being… More
Very Important Strangers
A few weeks ago I spoke at the excellent re:build conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. While it was my first time in Indiana, the setup was familiar. 200+ attendees, great venue, single track, and conference coordinators who know how to put on a great conference. (And one surprisingly gotham-y gorgeous building.) I was the last speaker… More
Full of Interesting Strangers
In its second year, XOXO is a legitimate replacement for SXSW. Full of bleeding-edge makers of things, XOXO has a fascination with fuchsia and a great badge. I can write this because over the years, I’ve developed a strong opinion regarding badges. A Badge Connects You to the People The following are my current beliefs… More
Building Serendipity
Blake looks tired. He’s sitting in the food court at O’Hare Terminal 1. He’s halfway through a beer and the jokes are coming out, but they’re a little labored. Blake is tired. Blake’s tired because Blake goes to a lot of conferences. Earlier in the conversation, he was explaining the next month of travel and… More
I Don’t Multitask
I’m at the end of a conference week and I’ve just moved hotels. This is normally a hassle, but the broadband in the prior hotel blew, which means I’m a week behind on everything. Once I’ve checked into the room, the first thing I do is fire up Safari and watch the first page load.… More
It’s Windy in Wellington
The presentation season kicked off for me with a week in New Zealand at the Webstock conference. I arrived early, which, as it turns out, wasn’t the best use of my time, as I spent two solid days of what should have been vacation stressing about slides. Among the many highlights was the speaker dinner… More
The Nerd Handbook
A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff. All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head. It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that.” We’ll explore the consequences… More
Shaking the Atoms
Acquiring video games prior to console domination and the modern Internet era went like this: I walked into Electonics Boutique or Egghead Software, went to the PC section, and began to physically pick up the games. I held them in my hand and I was looking for two things: did it have the right weight… More