By Chris Gulker

When last my words appeared here, I described a geek dinner where we all sat around and commiserated about the tech bust. Things will be better in the New Year, right?

Wrong, at least in my case. My first 7 days of 2003 saw me unable to connect to the Internet, the longest period IÕve ever been off the Net. Technology was at the root of all my woes, and caused me, of all people, to actually doubt the value of modern technological wonders. Indeed, IÕve been wondering if we-all in techie land need to sit down and seriously rethink things.

It started on Christmas day, when my DSL net connection stalled. We have a fairly standard Silicon Valley home configuration here [<] 7 computers in the den, 5 more in a rack in the garage. The home network has 4 switched hubs, a hardware firewall and an WiFi as well.

The side of the den that spouse Linda confines me to is festooned with monitors and keyboards: it looks like the deck of the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar in the geek cult classic The Matrix. LindaÕs side of the room, with big-screen TV, DVD and 6-speaker sound isnÕt exactly the Luddite zone, but nothing over there has an Internet connection. Yet, anyway.

So I began the chore of inspecting my Linux network. Linux is a very stable operating system that rarely fails, and, in a way, thatÕs one of its problems. When a program blows up and starts behaving badly, Linux tends to grin and bear it and keep on working in situations where most self-respecting Windows machines would just crash.

So out comes my 1256-page copy of Linux, the Complete Reference (4th Edition), a big bottle of spring water and a small glass of wine. The typing commences. Thus began a week-long marathon of frustration. It turns out that in sequence one of my switches failed, a card in one of my ISPÕs computers failed, my firewall failed and I was nailed by a virus and a hacker all in short order.

The amount of work required to discover and fix these things was outrageous: my shoulders still ache from sessions hunched over a terminal program. My ears still ache from screaming matches with my ISPÕs support department. Me my ISP, the phone company and their DSL contractor are all out dozens of hours that might otherwise been productively spent inventing, say, The Next Big Thing.

Modern technology is just too hard. There are literally hundreds of poorly-documented, hard-to-understand things than can break just on my side of this Internet connection, and the gods may not know how many things there are to go wrong at my ISPÕs giant network center.

This complexity is not without reason: the magic of instant global communications isnÕt an easy thing to do, and it took a lot of thought and a lot more work to achieve. But thereÕs also a geek factor, where we who built these things havenÕt often bothered to think about who would be using them, and how.

We humans and technologically complex systems live in parallel universes. String theory says that parallel universes canÕt see or talk on the radio to each other, but maybe they could feel each otherÕs gravity. Humans, and human technology are in similar straits: we donÕt see or talk to each other, but our respective gravities can pull us both down, hard.

We need better ways to manage complexity. We need to think about people before we think about bits. We need to make this stuff easy to use and fix. Make that my New YearÕs resolutionÉ

Updated 4/16/04; 1:56:18 PM

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