Following excerpted from "Flashbacks: Marching Towards Midlife" - a work in progress...
Christmas 1986
“I can’t believe they do this for everyone,” Megan slurred after waking to a miniature Christmas tree on the table beside her hospital bed, a tree adorned in a rather uniquely-personalized manner - with little bottles of Baileys.
But I’m getting ahead of myself (again, and so soon)…
Megan, still a Junior at Georgetown at the time, had a job (of sorts) at Saxa’s, the little hole-in-the-wall student store in the basement of the Healy building. Meanwhile, I was six months into a job at Basis Point, account managering or something or other, not too far from campus in the new Washington Harbour complex on K Street. I can’t recall the time of day, nor who it was that called from Saxa’s, but I do recall how desperate the voice was that told me Megan had been hurt, badly, and that I should get to the hospital.
Funnily enough, while twice the distance from the hospital, my cab and I got there before Megan and the ambulance. A bit frantic that I couldn’t find her, I became a bit more so when they carried her in, arm wrapped, blood pretty much drenching her. Seems she’d been in the Saxa’s stock room stacking, counting or, well, stocking, when she turned and inadvertently stuck her arm into a large industrial venting fan set in the wall (sadly someone had neglected to install a protective grate). Sliced her arm almost right off – straight through the bone. Messy.
After checking her in at the hospital, I had the first of what over the years would be multiple Megan health-related chats with my not-yet-in-laws’. They wondered if they should come down to D.C. I assured them no need (what the hell did I know) – I’d look after her…
…Which, for the next few days, I did - at least in terms of visiting her in the hospital every day. Turns out that fixing up the wrist wasn’t as big a deal as the infection that resulted from the beyond-filthy fan blade that had sliced through her arm. Needless to say, Megan was heavily medicated and a bit out of it for a while, including that Christmas morning when she woke to find and misinterpret the miniature tree I’d brought in, adding my own decorative touches, including the little mini bottles of Baileys, a favourite of Megan’s.
Not long after Christmas Megan was released, and we flew up to Connecticut to spend a belated holiday with her family - the first of many of our remarkably generous Walsh Christmases. One of my gifts was a bottle of Dom, which Megan and I kept for many years, not popping it until New Year's eve 1991, mere days before we returned to Washington after two years in Ecuador. But, again (again), I’m getting ahead of myself...
December 20, 2009
December 03, 2009
further to recent - back to net neutrality...
...picking up where i left off and heading in a new but related direction:
..as all of that is happening (see last post), and it will, the bandwidth demands on the mobile networks are going to be overwhelming. among other things, those of us who drop 3 of 5 calls on at&t mobility in manhattan will soon be joined by our verizon subscriber brethren when the family of 'droids hit the networks...
and it'll be worse in the mobile world than the increasing latency we continue to experience in the fixed environment - notwithstanding accelerated deployment of higher bandwidth fiber, etc. - driven in large part by increasingly data-hungry social and content-based applications and services. kids that used to text are now video-skyping with equal fervor, and the question's begged: when might clogged fixed and mobile networks reach parity in terms of everyday customer frustration.
which, in turn, leads to my long-time favorite hobby-horse - network neutrality. i continue to believe that every consumer should be able to use the device of choice to access the services and content of choice across the network of choice. and i've never been terribly fair to the operators in my past rants on the topic. so, to balance the rhetoric, how are service providers to stay in business as consumer access increasingly commoditizes?
look for other value-added services is one answer, seemingly quite popular.
and that doesn't mean launching yet another music, video, social network, mapping or other such solution - good grief, the choice is already endless. but it does mean the big guys (operator-wise) chasing new enterprise-based telecommunications/IT services opportunities, guaranteeing paying companies competing in an increasingly globalized marketplace quality end-to-end, full service fixed, wireless, secure, hosted and managed IT services across the globe. great costs savings for those companies doing business multinationally in terms of scale and efficiencies, but also in terms of being able to redirect investments away from building out their own facilities and services. needless to say, all of this is already happening.
but back to network neutrality. if the big guys want to chase the enterprise dollars as the consumer side commoditizes, a huge value-add in those service offerings will be in guaranteeing more-than-adequate bandwidth for corporate customers. and, suddenly, tiering - in terms of pricing, access and bandwidth - seems an utter given, despite all of the rhetoric in washington. funny thing is, having raved to the contrary in the past, i get it, from a staying-in-business-perspective if you're a major telecoms/IT service provider. but, i worry yet more than before that the average consumer gets increasingly screwed, in terms of quality of service, breadth and depth of online experience, etc.
bottom line: there's got to be a balance. what we don't want to see, what we can't allow to happen, what would undermine the social, democratic, and innovation benefits of the internet, is the de facto creation of an internet ghetto...
more to come...
..as all of that is happening (see last post), and it will, the bandwidth demands on the mobile networks are going to be overwhelming. among other things, those of us who drop 3 of 5 calls on at&t mobility in manhattan will soon be joined by our verizon subscriber brethren when the family of 'droids hit the networks...
and it'll be worse in the mobile world than the increasing latency we continue to experience in the fixed environment - notwithstanding accelerated deployment of higher bandwidth fiber, etc. - driven in large part by increasingly data-hungry social and content-based applications and services. kids that used to text are now video-skyping with equal fervor, and the question's begged: when might clogged fixed and mobile networks reach parity in terms of everyday customer frustration.
which, in turn, leads to my long-time favorite hobby-horse - network neutrality. i continue to believe that every consumer should be able to use the device of choice to access the services and content of choice across the network of choice. and i've never been terribly fair to the operators in my past rants on the topic. so, to balance the rhetoric, how are service providers to stay in business as consumer access increasingly commoditizes?
look for other value-added services is one answer, seemingly quite popular.
and that doesn't mean launching yet another music, video, social network, mapping or other such solution - good grief, the choice is already endless. but it does mean the big guys (operator-wise) chasing new enterprise-based telecommunications/IT services opportunities, guaranteeing paying companies competing in an increasingly globalized marketplace quality end-to-end, full service fixed, wireless, secure, hosted and managed IT services across the globe. great costs savings for those companies doing business multinationally in terms of scale and efficiencies, but also in terms of being able to redirect investments away from building out their own facilities and services. needless to say, all of this is already happening.
but back to network neutrality. if the big guys want to chase the enterprise dollars as the consumer side commoditizes, a huge value-add in those service offerings will be in guaranteeing more-than-adequate bandwidth for corporate customers. and, suddenly, tiering - in terms of pricing, access and bandwidth - seems an utter given, despite all of the rhetoric in washington. funny thing is, having raved to the contrary in the past, i get it, from a staying-in-business-perspective if you're a major telecoms/IT service provider. but, i worry yet more than before that the average consumer gets increasingly screwed, in terms of quality of service, breadth and depth of online experience, etc.
bottom line: there's got to be a balance. what we don't want to see, what we can't allow to happen, what would undermine the social, democratic, and innovation benefits of the internet, is the de facto creation of an internet ghetto...
more to come...
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