While I have been staying here in Queensland I’ve been staying here at my parents compound (thats really the only way to describe it – the place is huge!). While the house itself is beautiful it lacks one critical infrastructure component that any self respecting geek requires – a broadband connection.
During the day I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to head into my fathers shop and pull down my e-mail and feeds on an ADSL link. The problem at the compound is that its a fair way out of Caboolture and there isn’t sufficient population to really justify Telstra upgrading the exchange to support ADSL – so I’ve been using the trusty dial-up link.
Its a pretty painful experience and I am reminded once again of just how important broadband connections are to people in our field. If I was to draw an analogy its like sitting on a chair in the middle of the room with all the lights out.
One of the things that constantly amuses (or mystifies) me is the fact that in many organisations (both government and private) Internet access is restricted or in some cases not available.
When this happens to software developers they take a major productivity hit. While the MSDN Library contains the most complete API reference its not that good for finding out the reasons why things don’t work the way you expected. This is where searching newsgroups, blogs and the web generally come in.
This means that developers need to solve every single problem by themselves without leveraging the help of other developers around the world, its a dark room problem and if any organisation things this is a good way to operate then they will need to pay the heavy price.