Playing catch-up

To summarize last week, for the terminally curious:

Saturday, the wandering Jaguar E-type driver Larry Wade arrived at my house with his daughter. Partially inspired by my summer roadtrip with Nicholas a few years ago, he was out on a tour of the West with his kids. I gladly extended an invite to stay here at Chez Goolsbee, and helped him arrange an automotive checkup with Geoff Pickard to have a look at his E-type after a few thousand miles of road tripping. He planned on sending his daughter back to LA and pick up his son, but the fine efforts of United Airlines completely destroyed his planned smooth kid-exchange schedule. Sue entertained his daughter with a trip to see horses, while Larry picked up his Nicholas-age son. The two boys hit it off well and we had a huge dinner Sunday night at our house.
On Monday, Sue & I has a busy day in Seattle, dealing with a legal issue that my company hired her to perform… As in all legal proceedings it was a royal pain in the posterior, and nobody came away happy, but it was all done, so we were satisfied to be finished with it. We dropped off Larry’s daughter to get her flight home as well. My father was in Seattle and came home with us, so we had a full house!
Tuesday I took the day off and went for a drive with Larry & son, bringing Nicholas along too. We went to Fidalgo & Whidbey Islands, with a nice stop at Deception Pass. You can see the photos here. In the evening we all went out for Mexican food here in Arlington as Larry’s treat.
Wednesday I took my dad back to Seattle for his flight home, and worked. The Navy’s Blue Angels arrived and we watched them land at Boeing Field from the building’s roof.
Thursday I was invited to a CTO/CIO/Geek-thing by a bandwidth broker here in Seattle, where we were shuttled out to a houseboat moored on the log boom in Lake Washington. We had a front row seat for the Blue Angel’s two practice flights that day. I was surrounded by high-level geeks who had just experienced an outage at a competitor’s facility earlier in the week. The second or third outage for some of them. The timing could not have been better as we are just completing a major build-out of our facility, and unlike other datacenter’s in Seattle we have power and cooling to spare (we are running at ~10% of our capacity right now!) Needless to say, it was a fruitful day. The ironic cherry atop the sundae was there were also two people from a huge company that we had lost the deal on for colocation earlier in the year, who picked this competitor over us. They were still not “live” at the new place, but it was interesting to see their faces as the other customers of that facility complained about their problems.
Friday my family came by the office mid-day and picked me up for a weekend trip down to Oregon to visit relatives. We drove Sue’s new Jeep Liberty CRD down and back to central Oregon’s high desert. We ran on roughly 25% home brew fuel, and turned a respectable 27 MPG. While laying in a hammock and watching the stars Friday night I witnessed two satellites orbiting in near-identical paths… one following the other very closely. Almost as if they were just about to, or had just completed a docking maneuver. Fascinating to see.
We spent some time Saturday being separated from our money at the Deschutes County Fair… a very expensive day indeed (I haven’t been ripped off that bad since Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, UK). If they could have dinged us a dollar a breath they would have. Sigh.
Sunday we returned with my Mother-in-law in the Jeep, Christopher & I sharing the driving duties. I spotted an E-type in Biggs Junction, Oregon… a series 1 2+2.

So that’s what has been keeping me away from blogging of late.