Slightly Sensible - B&B Insider

Blackouts, forest fires and good stories

  

 delicious  

  

Dear Reader,

While paddling in and about Northern Minnesota last week (in an area that’s currently on fire). I was thinking about interesting people and good stories. Interesting people are full of experiences –but not just any old experience – it’s the ones where things go wrong that make for good stories.

A good trip is much the same. Take a trip with perfect weather, no lost luggage, no epic storms or forest fires. You’ll take away some epic memories but frankly your stories will be a big yawn.

Trips where everything goes wrong (yet you manage to make the best of the situation) leads to good story telling.

Same goes for people. People that are the most interesting are often people that screw up. The more mistakes they make the more interesting they are (but people that screw up and never recover aren’t so interesting). People that run into adversity and - eventually - overcome it have captivating and meaningful stories to share.

Technical people often get the opportunity to screw up in very impactful ways. I bet the tech out in the deserts of Arizona that pulled the plug on 6 million people will have a good story to tell some day. I hope so anyway.

Being in the product development business, I find that products have a story to tell too. I don’t care how big or small a company is, you can find drama behind product development that never makes it as far as the marketing literature.

Here in the engineering labs and hallowed Dilbert cube halls of B&B things are no different. Sure we have some products that cruise through development with little drama, but that doesn’t typically create the bonding experience that only stress, late nights and passionate debates can build.

Take our Zlinx Xtreme outdoor wireless modems and I/O. You would never know it, but in our quest to have an outdoor radio product that was small, powerful, easy to use and didn’t require teeny tiny little tools to wire, we really got ourselves twisted up. Right up to a last minute kill decision that put the product back to the drawing board just before its initial release. Cost us some real time and money, but the end result was an award winning product line that will sling your sensor data between nodes with such ease that you’d never know that you’ve gone wireless.

Rugged USB products have an interesting story to tell here at B&B as well. The trouble there all started over a decade ago when, as part of our own test configurations, we were unable to find any commercial USB products that would survive the rigors of our various surge testing that we subject each and every B&B product to. We had to learn all kinds of tricks to help USB ports and host PC’s that were running our test software survive without damage or lockups. Then customers started having the same problems as they started using USB peripherals in the field in less than friendly environments. Over time, our own boneyard of smoldering PC’s led us to the development of what our own and customer testing tells us is the most rugged and reliable line of USB converters, hubs and isolators on the planet. If you’re using USB in an environment that’s more demanding than printing out today’s lunch menu you’ll want to talk to us about USB isolation. Or, if you need to connect a serial device to a USB port, save yourself time, frustration and damage and go directly to one of our isolated USB to serial converters. A can’t-fail installation procedure, rock solid drivers and 2000 volts of isolation protection ensure that you won’t waste your day, or your PC, chasing problems that you never even knew you had.

Even our newest line of rugged and compact Ethernet switches went through their own Soap Opera drama. When we built our ESW100 line, a 3rd generation switch here at B&B, we knew we wanted it to be compact, but didn’t want to give up fiber options. (Other manufacturers give up on compact when they add fiber to their edge switches because they’re still using bulky, old school SC and ST fiber connectors). Well the rest of the world moved on. LC connectors are smaller and easier to use. Yet change isn’t easy and the discomfort of doing something different than all the competition out there wasn’t easy for everyone to swallow. It was the right move – if you haven’t used one of our ESW105 or ESW108 switches yet (especially the ones with fiber), try it – you’ll be glad you did.

Hope you’ve made some good memories and stories this summer. Share them here.

Happy Connections,

Mike Fahrion