Idle State

...so if this pos.t isx a l1ttle sl0 and hard to reqd it's becase Im tping from the Mddle Est. Not really. The sand storms are making it hard to read my screen. (No kidding - it's really windy and cold here at the moment.)

In the last two days, some dudes in ships have "accidently" dragged their anchors through three submarine cables providing network to us here in the Gulf and some of India.

See Blogger News Network

So for the past few days the internet has been noticeably slower than it's usual Middle East 'net slowness. All my favourite sites are timing out fairly frequently the international telephone is fairly unreliable. Strangely I don't feel particularly disconnected from the rest of the planet although it would probably be different if we had no connection at all.

Side Note To App Designers In The US: not everyone has the benefit of the speeds that you have for net access. A few infamous web applications that constantly run into trouble because their designers underestimated the response times in locales like ours: Facebook (interminably slow), Google Reader (constantly times-out too quickly on Ajax requests), Blackberry by Etilasat (DNS lookups can take time - be more patient and get the freakin' email delivered rather than just giving up), DVorak.org (so much crap on the page that it takes forever to load - and then you have to reload the page because the cretins don't give you the content until your referer is their own site !?!)

Oh. And while I'm ranting, all you in the US who think US $10 per month internet is expensive: Here in Qatar we have an entrenched carrier and we pay over US $100 per month for 2048/512 DSL that has about one 9 and four zeroes reliability. So quit griping.

There's probably some fabulous CIA or anti-terrorist plot or another price-of-oil conspiracy theory or maybe there's just a a coincidently high number of sailors with particularly bad seamanship in West Asia at the moment. Not sure. Anyhow, if you can't contact your local bank's outsourced call centre over the next few days, that's why.

Update: I received loads of traffic from searches for "cable cut conspiracy". Seems like there's now a fourth cut cable and Egypt are claiming that there actually wasn't any ships in the area that where the cable runs. As far as I can tell, it probably is one of three things - damage caused when the spy submarines were tapping into the cable offshore, built in obsolescence (anyone seen an Alcatel salesman hanging around?) or maybe it's the reverse vampires. "We're through the looking-glass here, people".

More Here