Category: life

where everything else happens

GOES Satellite image

So, it isn’t a car picture I know… but I like it.

This is an image captured via the GOES widget yesterday morning. I love several things about this image… The coastal fog, and how it describes the valleys along Gray’s Harbor and the Columbia River so well. There is also morning fog through the Snohomish River valley. Most impressive though is the massive bulk of Mt. Rainier, rising up and dominating its corner of Pierce county, the rising sun illuminating the glaciated eastern slopes, and casting a dark shadow to the west.

If you look closely you can make out the forms of other mountains; Olympus, Baker, Shuksan, Glacier Peak, Mt. Adams, and even Hood and Jefferson in Oregon, but none stand out like Rainier.

I spent yesterday travelling from our house to Roche Harbor on San Juan Island (and back) to attend a wedding of a friend and colleague at digital.forest. Dave & Tanya Anderson married each other on a the day that dawned in the image above… in perhaps one of the most beautiful places in the world.

We drove out to Anacortes, and boarded the 11 am ferry to Friday Harbor, where we enjoyed a lunch, had a brief stop at the “English Encampment (from the “Pig War” that established the final boundary between the US & Canada. We’ve been to the American Camp before, but had never yet visited the English one.) Then on to the wedding ceremony and reception in the garden of the Hotel de Haro at Roche Harbor. It was a truly wonderful day. We returned via the 10PM ferry which stops at every ferry-serviced island in the San Juans, which allowed us a nice car-deck nap of two hours, interrupted only by the occasional docking and an idiot in an Audi who set his frigging car alarm when he wandered off to the passenger deck. (Thankfully the WSF tracks these idiots down and delivers public embarrassment.)

Adventures in Towing, part 4

The E-type had another trip on a flatbed this past weekend. :p

It has a NON-stock fuel pump, in this case a Mallory, which requires the use of a fuel pressure regulator. The latter device failed. I replaced the pressure regulator and the problem (loss of power, engine dying) did not go away. To make a very long story short: Car died on Chuckanut drive (right about here) not too long before sundown. I went into full troubleshooting mode, looking at the fuel delivery system back to front. We ran out of daylight before we figured it out. I called the insurance company (who provide a gratis 10 mile tow) who had a local flatbed company bring me to a friends house near Bow, Wa. I spent half the day Monday under the bonnet of the Jag in their driveway, until I figured out that the new part was just as bad as the old bad part. sigh. Oh well.

The upside is that I found a GOOD aftermarket pump, that will deliver the native pressure the XK engine requires, and as a bonus, it is inexpensive and comes with a serious endoresment.

The image above is from my infamous “voltage regulator” incident a few years back. Perhaps I have a problem with “regulators”?
You can read about it here. There is even a pic of my Mallory fuel pump there.

Anyway, big thanks to Greg Bilyeau, who came out from his home in Bellingham to help me out. Thanks also to Mike Hinson, who graciously allowed me to use his driveway as a garage for a day, and loaned me some compressed air, and some expertise. Huge thanks to Paul Wigton, my telephone tech support guy!

Bruce MacCormack also offered a bed for the night for us, which in the end I didn’t require. I would have stayed up all night watching “Grand Prix” on his big screen anyway. 😉 Thanks Bruce.

I’ve been pirated!

eBay: E TYPE JAGUAR Print Mounted & Framed (item 280019208603 end time Aug-24-06 13:16:09 PDT)

OK, so now I know how Lars Ullrich feels. 😉

Seriously though, I’d gladly GIVE away this photograph to anyone who asks (and in fact I do) but that doesn’t give you the right to print it, sell it, and not give me a slice of the payout! Grrrr.

I’m going through ebay’s copyright infringement process, and have notified the seller as well. We’ll see how it turns out.

Looking through the seller’s other items seems to be a target rich environment for any copyright attorneys out there.

Almost time for another big adventure.

Longtime goolsbee.org readers know that I lead a dull existence as a technology salaryman for ~50 weeks a year, baby-sitting both a giant refrigerated room full of expensive machinery and an adjacent room full of socially inept geeks who take care of the machines with me. But at least once a year, and twice if I’m lucky, I zoom off to some exciting place for a week and find myself surrounded by expensive machinery and socially inept geeks who take care of those machines.

Um, wait a minute, that didn’t come out right.

Let me phrase that better…

I go on a vintage car rally! Whoo hoo!

This is where I get all these old car pics. This is where I don’t think about web and database servers, or the inner workings of the Border Gateway Protocol for a week. This is my idea of fun. So in just a few weeks I’ll be climbing into the 65E with my Dad and driving over to Montana, where we’ll participate in the second annual “Going To The Sun Rally”. I was probably one of the first to sign up for the “First Annual” last year, but the whole engine debacle prevented my participation. Thankfully the organizers let me try again. It should be a ton of fun.

I’m spending the next couple of weeks prepping the car. Today I’m draining the gas tank and checking the filter screen on the dip tube. I had a fuel-delivery issue at speed a few weeks ago to sort out. Monday I’m transferring a sizable chunk of my bank account to SNG-Barratt, a Jag parts supplier, for some spares. Lots of little things to do. I’ve also got to get the engine up to Geoff to sort out that loose tappet sound on the exhaust side of the #1 or #2 cylinder. Jags should purr, not rattle. 😉

As always, I will thoroughly document my week here on my website. I’m looking forward to the adventure, I hope you are looking forward to watching it unfold here as well.

What happened to the Conservative idea of smaller government?

Armored personnel carrier puts Germantown in state of readiness – Autoblog

Please tell me again how this represents smaller government? What a complete waste of taxpayer dollars! It seems to me like some boys wanted somebody else to pay for their toys. Unfortunately that somebody else is you and me. The Department of Homeland Security is the biggest waste of federal money ever created. This is bureaucracy that FDR, or even the Soviets, could only dream of!

This on top of “spend and spend” makes me wonder how conservative the current administration really is. They seem to be pretty damn liberal when it comes to spending money of goofy stuff like this.

Apple Announces Intel Xserve

MacSlash | Apple Announces Intel Xserve

OK, so I’ve never really developed this site into a “technology pundit’s page” like so many of my friends have (see blogroll), so I’ll point you to some comments I made about the new Xserves from Apple on MacSlash.

I REALLY wish that server makers would get out of this “must be ONE RACK UNIT” rut they are in. To achieve this supposed holy grail of server size they are getting completely absurd in the one dimension nobody talks about… namely depth. To Apple’s credit, they’ve given a center-mount option to the Xserve since day-one, but it still is way too long. The original is 28″ long and this new Intel-CPU’ed Xserve iteration adds another 2″ to that, to now be 30″ long.

I’m sorry folks, that’s beyond absurd. It is ludicrous.

I’ve always maintained that Dell does it to sell their own proprietary cabinets. Apple has no such excuse. I wonder where they’ve added the depth in relation to the center mount area? At the back? In the front? 1″ in both directions? It should make adding a Xeon Xserve a challenge to an already populated rack or cabinet of Xserves!

We use awesome Seismic Zone Four rated cabinets from B-Line, which are adjustable with regards to the mounting rails, but once set, you really don’t want to move them. If you put a server that is 28″ or longer into them the cable management starts getting tough and ends up presenting a real impediment to air flow. With the Dell gear we have to just remove the doors to make it work, which when you think about it, pretty much negates the whole reason for putting a server in a cabinet! The majority of our Xserves are mounted in “open” Chatsworth racks. Those excellent and bullet-proof workhorses on the high-tech world. This removes all the airflow issues, but row density suffers because you have to accommodate the Xserve, the cables, the people space front and back, PLUS the space to fully slide the Xserve chassis open and not interfere with the row of servers in front of it. I realize what I’m about to say is counter-intuitive, but here is some reality for you:

1U servers such as the Apple Xserve actually lower your possible density of installation.

I’ll repeat…

1U servers such as the Apple Xserve actually lower your possible density of installation.

I could have a far more efficient datacenter layout with 2U servers if their form factor was 2U x 18″ x 18″. This would allow me to space my ROWS of racks closer together, and more importantly maximize my electrical power per square foot far more efficiently than with 1U boxes. If you do the math on Apple’s new Xeon Xserve the theoretical maximum electrical draw of a rack full of them is 336 Amps @ 120 Volts. Of course servers rarely run at their maximums, but that is a terrifying number. The “standard” amount of power per-rack in the business these days is 20-60 Amps. Given that it is in reality IMPOSSIBLE to have a rack fully populated with 1U/2PSU boxes due to the cable management nightmare of power cords, and the heat load of putting so much power in so small a space, why bother building 1U boxes? Why add insult to injury by making them as long as an aircraft carrier deck too?

THIS is the ideal size for a server. 2U in height, and rougly 18″ square in the other 2 dimensions. It makes for perfect rack density, row density, and the most efficient use of power (and of course cooling) per square foot of datacenter space. Airflow becomes manageable. Cable management much easier. Storage options more flexible. Heat issues minimized. etc. Do any of the server makers ever visit datacenters? Or do they just assume that 1U is what people want? Do they just listen to trade rags (written by people who sell advertising, not run datacenters!) or do they actually get out in the field and talk to facility operators?

I wonder.

My other beef with the Xserve has been Apple’s complete “slave to fashion” reluctance to put USEFUL ports on the FRONT of the unit. They REALLY need to put the USB and video ports on the front of the Xserve, NOT the back. Why force somebody who has to work at the console (and trust me OS X Server isn’t mature and stable enough to run headless forever… ) to work in the HOT AISLE? The backside of a stack of servers is HOT, and a very uncomfortable place to work. If you put the ports on the front, where the power button and optical drive are located already, there will never be a need to walk all the way around the row of racks and try to remember which server was the one you were working on. Apple actually did a hardware hack (with buttons on one side flashing lights on the other, to fix this design flaw. In reality the only time you really SHOULD be looking at the back of one of these servers is when you are installing it. After that, all admin functions should be performed from the front side of the server.

Again, makes you wonder if Apple actually spent any time in a datacenter or considered any functionality in their design, or was it just meant to look good in a glossy brochure or on a trade show floor?