Harry Potter and queuing for food

"Network buildout status report..."

Whew, it is really all beginning to blur. It's been a little under two weeks now that I've been here at Hylands Park. Next Friday (in under five days) we should deploy most of our equipment in the field and then on Saturday go to live operations. A lot of cabling is still to be done and (that's what I've been up to the past several days) about a hundred switches to configure and over fifty wireless access points. Good thing about the having such a mass of devices on the network is that it actually makes sense to spend the time to automate the configuration process. Build a reference configuration, test it and then deploy. Bad thing: our lab setup with some twenty devices is extremely noisy (all those fans) and temperature-wise almost sauna-ish.

Harry Potter

Anyhow, we took the afternoon off on Sunday and headed out to Chelmsford for, guess what, to see the new Harry Potter movie: The Order of Phoenix. Fun diversion from all the "work" of the network build (which in itself, is a treat). The movie itself was enjoyable but nothing that special: good but not great. It just doesn't work that Gandalf is playing Dumbledore. Dumbledore vs. Voldemort was spectacular, but still not quite as epic as Gandalf vs. Saruman. And that evil wizard with his long blond hair: that was too Elrond.

Leaving the theatre I remarked to one of the Finns in our team about J.K. Rowling and it turned out that a girl we were just passing by was a Finn also. She'd recently arrived to work in Chelmsford, but hadn't heard anything about the Jamboree and was quite surprised about it all (as we enthused about 40'000 scouts being in Hylands Park in a weeks time or so). More surprising was that they didn't know anything about the Jamboree at apub we visited some days ago. And that was the second closest pub to the park, only a mile or so away.

Oh, and about Potter still: When I was here in 2005 for Eurojamboree the Phoenix book had just been released and was on sale at Sainsbury's at the camp site. I bet Potter VII is going to be a best selling article on the supermarkets at the WSJ, too. Probably quite a few participants will be spending their first evenings away at Hogwarts. And I talked with my girlfriend Hanna today (she's in Damascus, Syria studying at the moment) and apparently Potter is big there too. Some of the Americans also studying Arabic at the Damascus University were troubled that they'd be really out of touch with the Potter pop culture phenomenon if they couldn't get hold of book seven before they return to the US.

Queuing

Last weekend we had several hundred extra volunteers turning out to work on building the camp site. But with no extra capacity the dinner queues where on the order of one and half hours. Apparently there is a specific person in the Jamboree organization who's task is to think about queuing (especially for the huge IST restaurant) and try to optimize. The biggest issue is trying to make people decide quickly. Most of the time is wasted when people get to the counter and are presented a choice, say, pork or chicken. While they are making up their mind they are holding up the rest of the queue and also the person behind the counter. What makes this even more problematic is the multi-lingual/cultural environment. When a non-native, non-British person is presented with a "hash brown" the first time it will take some time ("a what?", "what's in it?").

Reminds me of the switches we have. Or queuing in packet switched networks in general. Packets arrive on an interface at the switch, are queued and the switch will need to make a decision on the output interface. The more interesting (featurefull) you make the switching decision, the more time it will take (introducing latency). Certainly the same algorithms from queuing theory used in networking are more or less applicable to, well, a service team restaurant at a huge scout camp.

And back to Potter. Bought some Ben & Jerry's ice cream at the lobby of the theater. First, I had to make a choice on the two flavours of ice cream I wanted (easy enough, went for Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey). Next, I needed to select two different toppings.

Me: "Aa, um, okay, whipped cream."
Ben & Jerry's: "Well, you already have whipped creamm on this, comes with all."

Me: "Uh, let's have those caramel thingies then."
Ben & Jerry's: "But you already have those too, they come as default."

Me: "Well, chocolate chips, something, anything!"

And that's why I also loathe Subway. You just can't ask for a sandwich and get done with it by making only one choice. The thing is, I am not that particular what they actually put in the sandwich. I just want it to be a good one... and I don't like the restaurant to burden me with the process. Don't they do any market research for that? ;-)

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