There is something about a university computer lab at 11pm that feels different to working during the day. Everyone else has gone home. The building is quiet. You can actually think.
Methindu, Mithila and I stayed back to work on some networking concepts we had been meaning to get hands on with. We needed access to the rack equipment and the lab gives us that without having to simulate everything in Packet Tracer. There is only so much you can learn from a diagram.
The racks look like a disaster from the outside. The cables are a mess. There is a logic to it somewhere but nobody is finding it tonight.
We got through what we came to do, spent some time goofing off, and called it around midnight. The Unitec lab has more usable kit than most small businesses — two full racks, Cisco gear, patch panels — and being able to come in and use it at odd hours is one of the things that actually makes studying here worth it.
Not every session has to be a breakthrough. Sometimes it is just good to be in the room with the actual hardware, figuring things out.