communication

[k45]

As she just posted, braemblerose has left the jungle and is now back in Iquitos. She called me last night, for the first time since she left for the jungle, and this morning we exchanged our first email messages since then. We're rapidly catching up on a backlog of communication, and looking forward to magnitudes more when we're together again this weekend.

I was able to call her at times, and when it worked the underlying technology was amazing to me. Here's the path for asking to speak with her:

1. translated into spanish
   
2. spoken by me
   
3. in to the microphone on my laptop
   
4. through Mac OS X to my Skype client
   
5. back through Mac OS X and out the 802.11g transceiver
   
6. through a few walls as a microwave radio signal
   
7. into the wireless access point side of my router
   
8. through NAT and out the WAN side
   
9. over 100baseT ethernet
   
10. through my DSL modem
    
11. out the window, by way of RJ-11 cable
    
12. directly into the small NID on the back of my house
    
13. over POTS cable to the central office 23,300 feet away
    
14. through the DSL modem on their end
    
15. somehow to my POP in Dallas, Texas
    
16. out onto the internet backbone as TCP/IP
    
17. routed to a Skype server somewhere
    
18. converted from VOIP to regular voice traffic
    
19. on to the voice telephone system in Peru
    
20. to a satellite transmitter
    
21. up to a telecommunications satellite
    
22. down to a solar-powered satellite phone
    
23. to whichever villager was nearest their one phone
    
24. hollered to whichever kid was nearby
    
25. down a dirt path by foot
    
26. to Braemblerose
    

Of course the routing protocol and transport layer of those last four steps was the most reliable of the whole transaction.