The Effect of Measurement

One of the first rules of problem solving is to define a set of measures for the problem. The problem is that creating these measures normally requires you to change something. This then gets you into the problem of the measures and their impact.

I was reminded of this today.

My home router has been dropping connections and generally misbehaving, so I decided to enable logging and to have the logs sent to my e-mail. This way I could get some idea of what the router was doing prior to having problems.

• Yesterday, without logging, the router dropped more than 10 times.
• Today, with logging, the router hasn’t dropped once.

IT systems can be very infuriating.

It’s nearly as bad as trying to understand Schrodinger’s Cat and the Copenhagen Interpretation.

PS: While I was writing this post, the router decided that it would drop the connection .