THE ROUTING OF REQUESTS IS DOWN - AGAIN!

Draft Version 1.2; 06-Sept. 2009
© 2009 Howard McQueen

My lucid dream from this Spring, “Rewriting the Human Infrastructure Programming” has ultimately aligned me to the fresh entrance and invitation of my life calling: writing poetry and diary entries (like those published on this blog). I am also compelled to step off the sidelines and come back to again teach. This teaching I am calling "Fellowship (internal/external) is found in what ever is arising".

This blog entry focuses on one aspect of the human operating system, i.e. our desire to respond to requests and our capacity to honor and tend to our queue of requests.

Fourteen years ago I was living a very stressful, frantic life. I owned and ran a consulting business and had spread myself too thin, took on too much overhead and was "shooting for the moon" of success. At the time, I did not feel good about any aspect of my life, as my operating system, my whole being, was filled to the brim with stress.

Today, life is quite simplified and my life quite still. I discarded an email package I used for fourteen years (Eudora) and switched to using Google's GMAIL for my internet email. Recently GMAIL was unavailable for upwards of two hours (a lifetime in computer time). As you will read below, the root cause of this was that a part of Google's distributed operating system, the request router functionality was overwhelmed.

Using the snippet from Google's email (to me as their customer - see below), I explore and draw parallels between Google's distributed operating system and the human operating system. The commonality I am playing with is the capacity to respond to an increasing number of requests, and what happens when capacity becomes overloaded.

Immediately below is Google's email to me, apologizing for and explaining the GMAIL service outage. By the way, for the two hours their service was down, they tacked on three full days of free service, extending my subscription.

From the Google Apps Team
On Tuesday, September 1, a small portion of Gmail's web capacity was taken offline during a routine upgrade and service update. However, we underestimated the increased load that some of the new updates placed on request routing.

As a result, at approximately 12:30 PDT, a few request routers became overloaded and responded by refusing all incoming requests. This response transferred the load to the other request routers, and as the effect rippled through the system, almost all of the request routers became overloaded. …

Upon receiving the error alerts, the Gmail Engineering team immediately began analyzing the issue and initiated a series of actions to help alleviate the symptoms. After determining the root cause to be insufficient available capacity ... - Gmail Team


THE HUMAN OPERATING SYSTEM'S REQUEST ROUTERS

Our request routers are completely overwhelmed
Besieged and under attack
From all the psychological stress of living at
the threshold of our capacity to seemingly cope.

[We experience a collapse in capacity to respond]

We take ourselves temporarily offline
we fall back, into retreat.
Licking our wounds,
formed around our intensive bouts
with our hostile world
and our resulting PTSD gloom and doom.

This is what it comes down to.
Meeting yourself as an entangled
work-in-process
Adrift - Rudderless
Paddling, sometimes frantically
in the mist.
Seeking solidity and sanctity of shore,
to draw your line in the sand,
to collapse and rest.
Then, back up again,
a bit more revitalized,
charging back into the fray,
to fulfill more response requests,
routing these to all your available fragments
in various degrees of distress

Is it finally ripening as your time
to give it all up,
to experience the rejuvenating spa of spiritual detox?
Let the tides and rhythms of life extol and wash you clean,
then completely away
from the conflicts arising within your duality play.

Playing constantly with the quantum energy held in contrary pairs [1]
we overheat and freezer-burn our essence, routing all these conflicting requests.

Honor the flowing of life: sometimes in, sometimes out.
Turn yourself about,
then perceive it all from the inside-out.



[1] Contrary pairs are energetically bound human polar opposites (pain-ecstasy, intimacy-separation, etc.). When a contrary pair is internalized and activated in the human operating system, an elaborate and often full-time ping-pong motion is released into play, allocating vast amounts of our inner capacity to attempt to cope with the resulting heightened dilemma of duality. Consciousness has no capacity to be at rest. Stress mounts, and this leads to doing and more doing and we loose touch with stepping back into the Silence, just to rest and allow things to just be.



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