A Day that Goes to Eleven

So today is November 11, 2011.  It's the 88th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's birth.  It's Veterans Day in the  US. (The original Armstice Day commemorated the end of World War I, and the documents were officially signed at 11am on November 11, 1918.)

But as a guy who works with numbers, I've been thinking about the numeric form  of today's date, which for a change works in both the US and the UK... 11/11/11.  I've been thinking about 11s and how they appear in our culture.  My favorite 11 of recent times is the 11 that Nigel Tufnel's amp goes up to in "This is Spinal Tap," the wonderful 1984 movie.  There's also Apollo 11 (the first spacecraft to land men on the moon, in 1969), the 7-Eleven convenience stores, and so many more.  There's even a current horror movie called 11-11-11.  Elevens are all around us.

The trick, of course, as I put this blog article together was to come up with a clever way to tie all that stuff into Riverbed.  Normally we look for the Riverbed tie-in before we choose the topic.  Not so much today. 

Very (VERY) late one night last week, one of my colleagues pointed out to me that the binary form of the ASCII space character is 01010101, and since one of the things that our Steelhead Appliances do so well is remove the empty spaces in your network traffic, you can think of that 01010101 as simply 1111 after it's been optimized down. That's it. That's all I've got today.  No videos, no nothing.  We'll get back to that stuff on Monday.

Well, I didn't promise anything especially profound today.  It's really a totally made up event anyway, as the dates and numbers on the calendar are almost totally arbitrary. 

Hoping that you take a few minutes to enjoy Elevenses today...