Things did not get off to a very fast start today. My focus is a little bit off at the moment. Things are even stacked up in my Google Keep note taking application to cover. I have been writing down a few ideas during the day in case inspiration does not strike before the sun comes up during these predawn writing sessions. Strangely enough this morning the only thing that really seems to be coming into focus relates to my thoughts about who might sell me the best possible donut this morning. When my attention shifts from writing to donuts things are not going to progress very well. The only thing saving this passage of prose at the moment is that the caffeine from two shots of espresso is starting to kick into action. The first change to leave the house and buy donuts will not happen for at least 30 minutes. That does leave a little bit of time to sit here and work on something. I’m going to try to ensure that it is not a top five favorite donuts list. That would not take thirty minutes to produce: 1) cinnamon twist/roll, 2) blueberry cake, 3) chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, 4) regular frosted, and 5) maple frosted. While that list is not exactly definitive it is relatively accurate. A wild mood here or there might inspire some other specific donut related food hunger that could push me outside of my top five. I have also not to the best of my knowledge ever had my top five donuts back to back at one time. I’d probably have to cut them in half and share them with somebody or finish them later to make that happen.
Whoa —- I have been publishing for 105 consecutive days and this is the first one where I got the dreaded, “This site can’t be reached,” error. Apparently the site was taking too long to respond to requests and timed out. It’s hosted so this happens from time to time, but it is still extremely annoying. Strangely enough from my phone I was able to get the mobile version of the website without any delay or timeout. It loaded pretty fast. I switched over and opened the website in an incognito window of Chrome which timed out as well. At this point, my best bet might be to go get a glass of water and bide my time for a few minutes while things stabilize. Generally the uptime from my server hosting company is pretty good. At the moment, that is not the case. After about 5 minutes, I did the logical thing and went out to Twitter and searched for “internet outage” and filtered to the latest instead of top tweets. Strangely enough for something that just started happening Twitter is generally faster thanks to the crowd sourcing element of how people post things vs. going out to a news aggregator like Google News. All of those Tweets are not curated or managed by a newsroom, but you can get a sense of an event like an internet outage by reading a few tweets that are similar to what you are seeing. In this case I’m just validating my experience through a crowd sourced platform.
Alternative methods for validation…
Another crowd sourcing option would be to visit one of the down detection websites that allows users to notify the world of their dissatisfaction with things that are down. I did load the down detector website (which is working) and whoa if it is now showing a massive number of major things are being impacted at the moment.
If you wanted to use Google Trends, then you could search for “internet outage” as a search team to see how many people are impacted and where. This method gives you results that are sorted geographically thanks to the power of Google. This can be more interesting if you are trying to dial into exactly where the problem happens to be occurring. The other methods are going to be more general in nature since they are way more open ended to worldwide feedback.
Instead of getting donuts this morning I’m sitting here reading about the internet outage. I’m sitting here wondering what might have caused this type of impact. That type of questioning actually pushed my dreams of donuts to the side for a few minutes. Today I had planned to spend some time watching videos on YouTube about the “Anthos Service Mesh” after my writing sessions. That effort has been postponed. The other thing I have been working on is watching videos and doing labs from Coursera in the, “Architecting with Google Kubernetes Engine Specialization.” I’m going to finish up the 4 classes on that one during the month of September. That is part of my continuous learning efforts to be able to know enough to actively work as a cloud architect. As things continue to consolidate into a handful of public cloud companies the reality of facing major downtime events is probably going to get worse before it gets better.
