I’m thrilled to be “off call” in about 4.5 hours, no longer tied to my pager and no longer anxious from possibility of waking up to the sound of nasty alarm. Really, the anxiety revolves around the randomness and the unknown of being paged.  What’s also variable is the length of these engagements: sometimes the troubleshooting takes 5 minutes and sometimes 5 hours. You just never know.

The point it this: I’m happy to return to a normal work week.

Best parts of my day

• Laying in bed next to my wife at night. For the past four or five months I’ve been sleeping on the floor on a foam tri fold out mattress laid out on the uncomfortable carpet floor. And finally, now that we are finally moved into our new home, I’m sleeping on a real bed and last night my wife and I laid next to one another. Sure, it was only about 5-10 minutes but hey: it’s the little things right?

Graduate School

• Wrote up a paper summary on “Building Reliable High Performance Communication Systems from components“
• Drew figures of barrier synchronization on my iPad
• Wrote up Project 2 (barrier synchronization) work log into Google Docs to share with my project partner

Thoughts

• Amazon Web Services draws inspiration from academia. For example, the techniques and principles used to build overlay networks within EC2 Network resemble the principles from the paper Active Networks (although there’s probably even earlier papers to draw inspiration from)