Windy days. 115 Km/h in some regions of Catalonia and, as you can tell by images on the news, some “material” damage and some personal loss have to, unfortunately, be acknowledged.

fallen trees due to strong winds in catalonia - from vilaweb.cat

Spain is a rather strange country where, when it rains (not a big shower, but just some apparently innocent raindrops…);

1) Trains do not work properly (Mostly those run by RENFE).

2) Blackouts (FECSA / ENDESA) are common and, therefore, tend to threaten all your power devices with a high voltage returning power supply which, if you are not aware of, will literaly burn some of your fridge, radio, tv, pc pluged devices.

3) Everyone takes the car to drive by any loctaion. So, traffic jams are expected everywhere.

The same, but worse, occurs when we have; snow, strong winds, fog or any combination of them.

WiFi is known to be altered by water, resulting in a loss of signal penetration. Humidity / fog being it’s principal enemies. That is why some people at the Czech Republic do link their WiFi devices with optic antennas, which is just great!

Optical link antena form free tech. project RONJA used by free wireless community CZFree in České Republic

Nevertheless, while waiting for the promise of generalized WiMAX, strong winds have put in the forefront one of the many advices Susan Leigh Star wrote about infrastructure in her 1999 article entitled; “the ethnography of Infrastructure” which bluntly is;

- “Infrastructure becomes visible upon breakdown”

Illustrators such as David Macaulay had previously done a great job showing the ring of the beast or, else, the invisible infrastructure. See; “underground” for instance.

Again, some happy hurricanated winds come to remind us how dependent we are of already existing infrastructures (hello from the missing masses front!)

RAX!