Lestheprof's Blog

At about 12 noon  today, the connection from my University to the internet went down. Not only that, but the telephone connection went down as well. The University was cut off from electronic communication (except, of course, for using mobile phones, but even these don’t exactly work well inside the buildings). It’s stayed out all afternoon, and it’s still down (it’s 7.30 pm as I write this, at home, using my home internet connection).

Of course, I’ve been an academic long enough to remember the days before the web (though not before the internet itself: I’m not that old!). Some things are much easier with the web – looking up references, particularly citation indexes (remember the days of the ISI 9 point printed citation indexes, that could use up a whole afternoon tracking down who had referenced some particular important paper?), but some things are actually easier without the web. Actually doing research, that’s to say writing (in my case) some MATLAB software for identifying the natural statistics of sound, without getting sidetracked. And instead of looking on the web, looking back at what I had been doing in this area in 2004, for the Gordon Conference on Sensory Coding and the Natural Environment, and rediscovering the relevance of that work, after almost ten years.

My researcher started off by telling me how wonderful it was not to have external email coming in. But by the end of the afternoon, he’d changed his mind, and was missing the ability to quickly and easily find out things from the web. I had a good afternoon, writing code, and leaving some independent component analysis software running overnight on my desktop machine. But if it’s still not up tomorrow, I too will be missing it! It’s ages since I made any meeting arrangements except by email (and I’m meant to be going to Edinburgh, and to Derry/Londonderry, and I’m waiting to hear something from the Medical Research Council, and so on…

So even this old Luddite will be missing it if it’s still down in the morning!

Tags: Internet down, telephone down

This entry was posted on February 26, 2014 at 7:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.