Thought Picnic: Time in motion

The mystery of time

Time is a continuum of sometimes unfathomable multi-dimensional ramifications. Time in its passing and what it archives into the annals of memory, time in its present and the moments we are given to cherish, time in its congruence demanding correctness for our modernity not to descend into chaos, and time in its coming; the future we cannot predict further than a second from hence that we plan for, sometimes anticipate and use expectation and hope to arrive at.

It comes to mind that from the past, 11 years ago, I lost a dear friend, Dick van Galen Last, the passage of time does not make the sense of loss less felt. Beyond the acceptance that he is gone, there are recollections of friendship and things we did together.

Sometimes I wonder if we could indeed turn back time if there is anything we would have done so differently for other outcomes. It is wishful but best left as is, an alternate universe can be anything, the same, worse or better, sticking to what you know is not so much the absence of adventure but a calculated risk erring on the side of safety.

The time is now

In the present, you are occupied with thoughts stretching into the recesses of time in all directions, you might catch yourself daydreaming. Realities cascading on themselves in the mind that you are left in awe at the capacity of the mind to imagine and project.

Out of this are issues of life and maybe death, you never know, but each breath is a blessing of the living and the joy of living. Then you think of the current pandemic that takes essential breath away, there is much suffering to escape from, and this is the time to be free from it.

Correcting for the time

For correctness, I remember an essential piece of information that would have been quite pertinent that I ignored. When I was trying to fix my network yesterday, my NETGEAR Nighthawk X6 R8000 router was stuck in the past, it was not synchronising with the current time, I was reading my birthday the 21^st of December 2020 on its clock. The stock firmware just could not communicate with any time source.

Blog - Technical: A whole weekend networking

Whilst the router appeared to work with this underlying discrepancy on the older hub, on the new hub it might have presented an issue as it was synchronised with a correct and external time source indicating over a month ahead of my router.

Time and time again

There are many systems that will fail to communicate or operate if time is not synchronised and there are slim tolerances for time differences especially when it comes to the Global Positioning System (GPS) which uses satellites. Authentication systems also rely upon synchronised time, the absence of which might suggest a cyberattack, an unauthorised intrusion or a security breach.

Installing the 3^rd-party firmware on my router immediately allowed it to synchronise with a European time source and it might have been the fundamental issue all along, but we had a fully working solution at the end of the day. The future is ahead, each second creeping relentlessly into a place that at once becomes the present and then the past. Further ahead we build for a place to be different, beautiful, and happy, hopefully with someone who makes it all memorable and matter.