There's No Way of Knowing Which Direction We Are Going

I feel a great sense of tension and worry whenever I remotely reboot a system. Every time. Every system. Whether it's a robust OpenBSD box or my Windows workstation at home, I always get this sick feeling in my gut. What if it doesn't come back up? I always take every precaution I can, and if a particular service might cause the machine to hang on shutdown, I'll seek to disable it ahead of time. But one can never be 100% certain that you've caught every problem and prevented every glitch.

And when I'm waiting the sometimes two minutes or more for the machine to start responding to a telnet of port 22 again (because ICMP pings are of course an open invitation for a cracker), I wonder how the guys at NASA do it. If you're sending signals to a robotic probe, whether it's snapping pictures of Jupiter or drilling holes in rocks on the surface of Mars, you're stuck there, waiting hours and sometimes days to get a response.

What is it that Willy Wonka says? "The suspense is terrible. I hope it lasts."