Broadband Not-So-Funnies

The wife wished me a good night several hours ago. I've got 18% left on my laptop's battery. I've been battling networking issues as least as long as she's been asleep. ATT sent me a new DSL modem and after solving a bushel of little technical mysteries (Why wont my router pick up the IP addresses of DNS servers as provided by my ISP? Why can't I hardcode the IP addresses of DNS servers that I know to work already?) things mostly work again. My server is still doing things that make my head hurt. I can SSH into it from a math department server at school, but I can't SSH into it from within the network in my apartment. I'm too tired to come up with any more hypothesis as to what the problem could be. 

Broadband Funnies

I lost DSL access last week. My DSL modem is dead as a doornail. I plug it in and no lights come on, not even the power light. I go to the ATT website, find the tech-support page and learn that I can get help via e-mail. I enter my e-mail address, and a note that consists of the first three sentences of this post. A day later, I get an e-mail saying, "Thank you for your note. Your case number is blah blah blah. Someone will help you shortly. This message was sent automatically do not respond." A few days go by and I get the following e-mail message.

Dear Mr. [LAST NAME],

Thank you for contacting AT&T Internet Service Email Support. I
sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused. I
understand that you are having trouble with your modem.

Please powercycle the modem with the following steps.

Powercycle Modem
1. Disconnect all of the cords from the back of your modem, and turn
your computer completely off.
2. Once the computer is off, wait for 60 seconds.
3. Turn the computer back on, and plug the cords back into your modem.
4. Attempt to surf again, and see if the issue has been resolved.
5. If the issue has not been resolved, please contact technical support
at 1-888-321-2375.  We will troubleshoot this issue further.
All Steps Complete

If the problem persist please contact our helpdesk at ...

The fact that the e-mail was signed with a plausible name, and the use of the pronoun "I" might lead one to believe that there was a human involved in this process. Although the advice has absolutely nothing to do with the problem I faced so I called tech-support this morning and, before I spoke with a person, I had to speak with a computer. The computer would ask my questions like, "Is the ready light blinking or solid?" and I would say, "It is neither blinking nor solid. It isn't on." to which the computer would say, "I'm sorry. I didn't understand you. Please say `blinking', or `solid' to indicate if the light is blinking or solid." The human I finally spoke with was quite helpful and told me I'd be receiving a new modem for only the cost of shipping. 

None of this makes me feel a deep sense of love for ATT. Not that I imagine Comcast is much better. Playing hockey last night I heard folks referring to each other as "comcastic" as a means to say one is excessively slow, and maybe a little bit sucky. I was about to start whining about the great woe and suffering of living under not-so-competent, monolithic corporations, but then I realized that there are alternatives. I've started looking into Speakeasy's broadband service and I might switch if it isn't too expensive. 

Fewer Items of Note

This blog isn't particularly anonymous -- I've left enough clues so that anyone who cared could learn my name. My goal was never anonymity, rather to make sure that Google doesn't return a link to fastchance if someone searches on my name. I couldn't figure out a way to remove my name from the list of shared news items so I've taken it down. 

Items of Note

Last weekend I went to the Smokys to go backpacking. Each time we've gone, we've had a better time than the last, and this time was mostly OK. The weather was Smoky-esque, but we knew how to stay dry. The hiking was pleasant, although we arrived late Friday afternoon and ended up hiking the last mile in the dark. (not dusk, but full on dark.) The only reason hiking at night in a huge forest known for its population of bears didn't give us the heebie-jeebies is that this was the third time we've done it, and we've got the drill down. When you start tripping over roots and rocks because you can't see, you break out the headlamps and hope you make it to your campsite before the batteries go dead. I think the stumbling followed by cursing is enough to inform any nearby bears that we are probably too stupid to taste good. (That's a joke -- black bears don't eat smart people either.)

Along the way I started reminiscing about my first year of grad school. During that first semester I felt like I was going to be washed away in the torrent of new material. To keep up I would wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 go to my desk and, while the wife slept, read over the material I thought would be presented in class. At 7:20 I would crawl back into bed and spend some impossibly short amount of time talking with my wife. Then I'd get up again and start another overwhelming day. My wife said that she traded in her husband for a roommate during year between the start of classes and passing the prelims. 

The feeling I remember most is that I was hugely inadequate to accomplish the task at hand, but that I really, really didn't like failing. I have since come to learn that this sense of inadequacy follows a lot of academics around. Certainly I don't feel like I will ever be at a point where I can sit down with an open problem and tick it off in an afternoon. Of course no one expects that I will ever be at that point, and the joy of research mathematics is that if one has two publishable results a year, one is doing remarkably well. 

In the years since the start of grad school my brain has stretched and deformed in the process of absorbing so many new ideas. On the other hand I feel far more emotionally inflexible. Who was that lunatic who got up at 5:30 in the morning? There is no way I would do that now. I feel like, "This is who I am. If that isn't sufficient to succeed at this, I'll do something else."  Put another way: I've got stress fatigue. Four years ago I responded to stressful work situations by working harder, now I take all the signs of impending career doom with a grain of salt and pretty much work the same rate all the time. Stress levels feel more akin to stock prices -- they go up and down, and you shouldn't really worry about the high-frequency stuff. 

Better still, I'm beginning to form a queue of research projects I'm interested in, and, more importantly, I think I could make progress on. This to me feels like a crucial step in grad school and one that I suspect a lot of students don't make. 

In any case the trip ended with the wife and I hiking the last five miles in sandals. They were remarkably comfortable and airy compared to my hiking boots which needed new insoles. 

Shoes

For reasons I cannot begin to fathom I find the wear patterns on the soles of shoes fascinating. I do have other interests. I'm interested in minimal energy problems. I'm interested in potential theory. I'm interested in developing new ways to use technology to allow people to work together. But I'm really interested in how shoes wear out.

In the summer of 2003, the wife and I took a huge road trip. Before we went, I bought a pair of expensive Tevas. They were billed as "expedition sandals", and while I was a little skeptical that one would take sandals on an expedition, I figured the high price indicated durability. It didn't. We were in Zion and the sandals were less than four months old. There is a beautiful hike that goes along a river at the bottom of a canyon. The hike literally requires walking through knee deep water and I could think of no footwear that seemed more appropriate than my expedition sandals. Halfway through the return part of the hike the sandals fell apart. When I looked down I saw that the foot bed had come apart into layers and that the straps had pulled out. I was able to tie the straps together to make something approximating flip-flops. Still, I had to stop every hundred feet and re-tie the straps. The experience left me pissed off at Teva, and at sandals in general.

Some years later the wife saw a pair of Chacos on sale for $30. She suggested I get a pair since my feet don't do terribly well in the summer in normal shoes, and the walk to and from school made quick work of flip-flops. I hummed and hawed and decided that $30 wasn't too much money to waste if I had similar luck with them as I did with the Tevas. The Chacos have lasted years, I've probably walked hundreds of miles in them. When I wore through the rubber, I was able to send them back to Chaco to get re-soled. That was a sad time for me, not just because I was without sandals, but because the beautiful wear pattern I had developed over the years was taken from me and replaced with spiffy, new, unscuffed up soles. The sandals weren't really mine again until the rubber on the soles began to show signs of being abraded against concrete. Not that this explains my fascination with wear patterns on shoes.

The thing is that shoes take way way more abuse than any other article of clothing. When I'm walking, each sandal or shoe takes a compressing force of 160 pounds every second and a half. Both the force and frequency are higher for running shoes. The compression isn't constant. The shoes are loaded up with force, and then unloaded, loaded up with force and then unloaded. The soles are applied to hard, abrasive, surfaces like sidewalks. And you can do this to a good pair of shoes for years. Further, a good pair of shoes will make your feet feel comfortable while you're doing this. To get a sense of what shoes do for you, try walking a quarter mile in bare feet on a sidewalk or street. A good pair of shoes solve a technically challenging problem. Put another way, if I had to, I could make pants and a shirt, they may not look nice, but wearing them wouldn't cause injury. The problem of making a good pair of shoes or sandals is something I find fascinating, and in particular the wear patterns indicate how the shoe is breaking with use. It somehow tells you exactly where the problem lies.

I just needed to get that off my chest.

Airports and Math

One of the joys and curses of being a mathematician (in training, anyway) is that one has the option of practicing one's craft nearly anywhere. This leads to some amount of guilt when one has the time but not the inclination to work. What is nice, though, is that when one does have the inclination, there are no barriers, save one's mental state, to reaching out to a world of ideas. 

I spent today in airports and airplanes and had a surprisingly productive day. It was surprising in that I normally require quiet and big chunks of time, but somehow the ambient noise and the small pieces of time worked for me. Whenever I travel I carry pencil and paper, and, waiting for my first flight, I opted to push on a very old idea. I had that rare experience where everything just fell into place. I was able to show that a certain alternate normalization for energy was equivalent to my normalization. It was like bowling four strikes in a row. Everything kept lining up perfectly. It makes me fearful of picking up the next bowling ball, so to speak, because I don't want my luck to end. 

Ice Hockey and Airplanes

At the beginning of the summer the captain of a team I used to play with asked if I'd be interested in playing as a sub. I said sure. I haven't played with this team in years. After tonight's game I remember why I stopped playing in this league. It's full of assholes. This league is the entry league where players with no hockey experience, and minimal skating experience start. I think, this allows fantasies of one day joining the NHL. Anything that darkens that fantasy -- like, say, someone who can skate better than you -- causes anger. I got knocked around tonight and endured some childish name-calling, and it isn't like I'm even a good hockey player. In the leagues where I normally play, hockey is not nearly so much a fantasy, but an enjoyable pastime, something that precedes drinking beer. The games are so much friendlier, everyone understands that it truly doesn't matter what happens. Not sure how much I'll keep subbing in with my old team. Mostly it just pisses me off that I let things get under my skin. 

Tomorrow I travel to a sort of distant city to attend a conference and give a talk. I've given various versions of this talk five times already. What I would really like to do is get this current paper hammered out, submit it, and start working on something new. I feel like it's been a while since I've been able to sit down with pencil and paper and actually do math.