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Montevideo, Uruguay: Two weeks later

After writing about our amazing coworking space, Sinergia, during my first week, and publishing some photographs of street art in the city in Uruguay, I haven’t been able to find more time to put my thoughts down, “on paper.” I feel as though time has sped along back in the United States – that I’ve been gone for months and missed so much; at the same time, my having so many new experiences away in South America has led to a feeling of life passing by slow motion. It’s like time passes slower in Uruguay than the U.S. I’m only now reflecting on the last two weeks and writing this update as I sit on a plane between Montevideo and San Francisco, where I’ll be speaking at Elastic{ON}^2 this week.

Start monitoring your home internet connection

NewRelic quietly released a new product called Synthetics earlier this year. While services like Pingdom have been around for a while, New Relic’s Synthetics has been the first option that made me actually shut down my own personal monitoring systems.

For the last five years or so, I’ve been monitoring everything, from websites I run to internet services at rental property. I generally used Nagios, and configured it to alert me via email when things go south. The data has always been a help when dealing with power companies, ISPs, and hosting providers. You feel empowered when you can say things like, “I had packet loss 24 times yesterday,” or, “The power has been surging every 2 hours for 30 seconds.” In fact, I’ve discovered I generally have better data than the customer service folks I’m speaking with.