Category: life

where everything else happens

A Truck Load of Salt

I took my son Nicholas to see his favorite musician, Jonathan Coulton play at the Moore Theater in Seattle last night. We drove down from Arlington, with a stop at Seattle institution Dicks for a bite:

Mmmmmmm. Says Nick. on Twitpic
The opening band was Paul & Storm:

(and yes, panties were thrown at the performance last night… seven of them in fact.)

Nick acquired a “Skullcrusher Mountain” T-shirt and stocked up on so many nerd hit points that I’m certain he’ll dominate the next D&D match he plays.

There was really only one downer for the whole night. A few rows behind us was seated a guy who was not only really loud, but also cracked wise at every pause in the show. Paul & Storm strongly encourage audience participation and this guy took the bit and ran with it… non-stop.

All.

Night.

Long.

Literally not a minute of the show went by without this guy hollering a punch line, or wisecrack, or just something stupid. One or two of his remarks/heckles/outbursts were quite funny. Three or four of them were picked up by the performers and made for funny moments. But the other eighty six of them were just tiresome, annoying, and several times threw the performers off their game. We ALL paid good money to see this, and more importantly HEAR this event, but at literally every quiet moment this yahoo became a bellowing distraction.

Like spice in a well-prepared dish a bit of audience participation is a wonderful thing. Had the audience last night all sat like cadavers, it would have been pretty dull (though one song demanded that we become zombies!) However too much is just too much. In this case a pinch of salt would have been perfect, and this one guy in the audience (let’s call him “Richard”, or “Dick” for short) arrived with a dump truck loaded with sodium chloride, backed up (beep… beep… beep… beep… ) into the auditorium, then dumped two tons of salt all over the show.

Really? Don’t be that guy.

The Winding Road Ahead, and a Glance at the Rear View Mirror.

To some this sign may be a warning. To others it is an invitation. A temptation. A true desire.

I’ve driven this particular road many times and always pause at that famous sign. It is one of those landmarks and moments where you step out of the car, relax a bit, stretch your legs, gather your thoughts, take a deep breath… and then dive in. As the road coils and contorts before you the senses heighten and sharpen, and your focus becomes laser-like. Right now I’ve metaphorically pulled over at that sign and am shaking the thoughts of the long straightway that lies behind me out of my mind, preparing for the focus required of the next challenge.

After ten years in my position at digital.forest, I’m looking to move on to something new.

If digital.forest were a road it would be a well-maintained six-lane freeway today… but I knew it when it was a dirt track alongside a cow pasture. Founded by a close friend in 1994 it was essentially a one-man operation for several years. My friend brought me on-board in the spring of 2000. In the decade since it has grown and prospered. The road did indeed have many treacherous grades and diminishing radius curves, but we navigated them all with aplomb and daring. Our industry boomed, and while we managed to raise some very modest capital, we watched in awe as competitors pulled in millions of dollars, and built amazing facilities. Then, very soon thereafter our industry busted. Those very same competitors had over-built, over-extended themselves, and died off at an astonishing rate not seen on earth since the K-T Extinction Event. We used our revenues wisely, not spending on luxury offices or standard “dotcom datacenter” frivolous eye candy, but instead focused on finding, serving, and retaining what we had: Great Clients. We did this through conservative spending on what was really important to our clients, namely buying critical infrastructure to ensure their uptime. This allowed us to grow and thrive when others were shrinking or dying. Of all the things we’ve done before or since, those worst days of our industry were truly digital.forest’s finest hour, and I look back at what we did, and how we did it, with pride.

We filled our original facility to capacity, and in 2004 went looking for a new one. We found one of those amazing facilities built in the exuberant boom days that had never been completed. It was perfect for us. Not too big, but with room to grow. Over several months in 2004/2005 we completed the long-dormant construction and moved in. It was the craziest half-year of my professional life. My team worked around the clock, seven days a week, for four months straight to build, equip, and then move a live datacenter twenty-nine miles across a major metropolitan area. Operationally it was a flawless migration. Our Account Management team did an amazing job working with our clients, letting them know what was going on and why, and scheduling their move times weeks in advance, often down to the minute. My Technical Operations team executed the move with speed and precision. Most importantly, we did not lose a single client in the process.

What amazing clients they are! I’ve met truly wonderful people during my time at digital.forest. It has been a privilege to serve them, and a joy to watch many of them succeed and grow. Most of all though, the greatest benefit for me has been to make many of them my friends. Our clients are in very good hands, as my other privilege has been to work with some of the most competent and capable people I’ve ever known in my twenty-five years in business.

That move to a new facility is what transformed digital.forest from a rural two-lane blacktop into a super-highway. We expected that “room to grow” would last us a few years, but within months we were expanding again, metaphorically going from two lanes to four, and then six. Curves were smoothed out, bridges built, grades reduced, and guardrails erected. What was once a winding road was now a superslab, on a straight and fast course over the horizon.

Personally, I prefer the winding road to the wide freeway. The challenges are more vivid, and the work keeps me alert and feeling alive. It has nothing to do with the size of the company, as even large organizations can have immediate challenges. I joined one of the larger companies in the Fortune 500, Federated Department Stores (now Macy’s Inc.) in 1990 when they committed to completely transforming their advertising processes from analog to digital. What an amazing ride that was! I left Macy’s to join a small, but international publishing company in 1995 to create an entire IT operation from scratch, then volunteered to transfer to their UK headquarters to successfully reorganize their IT department. From there I went to digital.forest and helped it grow eightfold during my tenure. It is on these sorts of courses I prefer to grab the wheel and shifter to carve up the corners. No freeway driving for me.

I have some projects to complete and/or hand off to others at digital.forest, but mostly I’ll be focussed on finding that next great road. Something that will get my engine roaring in tune with gear changes and sweeping curves.

Let me know if you hear of one.

Multitasking in my very own iPad.

A busy day in the barn

When I’m doing car maintenance I usually go about it in a very linear fashion. I disassemble, label and lay out parts, keep notes, etc. I rarely interrupt a job, as I prefer to focus my attention 100% on the task at hand. In other words, I prefer to single-task. Today however, I had a bunch of “routine” tasks to do.

  • The TDI needs new brake pads, as I could hear one of the rears making noise.
  • Sue’s CRD required a fill-up and an oil change.
  • I had a batch of BioDiesel to cook.

So today I went out to my little private idaho, my man cave, my … iPad … and I multi-tasked. Brake jobs are fairly simple and frankly monotonous. As are oil changes (especially now that I have my “sucka!”). Making BioDiesel is something I do even more often, but it does require more concentration.

Unlike the latter two, there are no “wait states” in a brake job, BUT even with a lift it is dirty, uncomfortable work, so I took a break from brakes at the completion of every corner, to wander off and do something else in the task list.

This is the little Diesel I cut my mechanical teeth on back in the 80s. John Meister's new-old 1981 VW Rabbit Diesel Pickup

An enforced break also came when my friend and BioDiesel co-op member dropped by with his “new” truck, a 1981 VW Rabbit pickup! Diesel of course. It was cool to see that old 45 HP machine under the hood, as it was also in my first car, a 1980 Diesel Rabbit. Nick came out and helped us unload, and load John up with two 20 gallon barrels of home-brew.

The brake pads of the TDI have a sensor built into the left-front side that set off an idiot light on the dash. This light has never come on in my car as of all the pads, this corner had the most left on them. Go figure. The inside pads on both rears were almost gone. The OEM pads back there have a subtle change of pad material in them that makes a grating noise when the pads are worn to that point. This is how I found out it was time to change them rather than the sensor/light combo. I visually check them when I have the wheels off, but will admit to never looking at the inside rear pads, as they are practically invisible, being almost completely obscured by the calipers. I figured if one pad was worn to noise-making I’d change ALL of them. The car has 150,000+ miles on it, so worth the cost of eight brake pads.

I cooked the home-brew, and changed Sue’s CRD oil with the MityVac between the corners of the TDI. The wheels were back on, and the CRD back in the garage in time to watch the Vancouver Canucks beat the Toronto Maple Leafs on Hockey Night in Canada. After the game I shut off the BioDiesel processor and had a nice dinner. I’ll take the TDI out for a test drive tomorrow.

It sure is nice to have my own “iPad” to work in.

Twitter as a Marketing tool: Failure

Twitter Marketing Failure

Twitter is an amazing communications channel. It serves to maintain several types of communications. Here’s how I use it:

  • Keep a sort of running conversation going with my friends, many of whom are literally scattered around the globe.
  • Follow news, as it is shared and interpreted by friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
  • Gain insight into things I’m interested in, such as Datacenters, the Network Operations side of the Internet, Web Hosting, Cloud Computing, Technology news, Apple, the Automotive Industry, Collector Cars, Photography, and the Pacific Northwest.

At work we use Twitter as an out-of-band comms channel with our customers. We post notifications of scheduled maintenance, new support blog posts, and real-time updates when there is any sort of an issue going on within our facility, such as UPS maintenance.

Twitter is great for items that are “important now” like that. Where I have seen Twitter consistently fail, is marketing to new customers via responses. Usually this is a Twitter API driven “bot” (automated software) that responds with a pat bit of sales-speak to any Tweet that makes mention of them, their product/service, or posts a URL that links to them in any way.

The image above is an example of one such miserable, fail-prone auto-replies. I posted a URL pointing to an article on TechFlash, which is a local news blog, covering the Seattle-area technology & business beat. The article in question pointed out the irony of a local Tech Exec, being swept up in a long-term criminal investigation concerning suspected organized crime involved in a Seattle strip club. The exec in question committed perjury with regard to having “Clintonian” relations with a stripper at said club. The irony of course was the same exec’s on-stage demo of their software which allows people to perform background checks of people they meet, on the fly using their mobile phone. The criminal history feature of this software is called “Sleaze Detector.” The layers of irony here are too good to pass up, so I sent the tweet.

The employer (which by the way has a history and reputation in Seattle of seemingly sleazy executives) of this seemingly sleazy executive responded to my tweet with a discount on their software!

This is why human beings are unlikely to lose their jobs to software over the long run. Software lacks judgement, and can not detect sarcasm or irony.

Wall Street Sheep bleat to Steve Jobs’ tune.

I don’t have anything to say about Apple’s new “iPad” device. Unlike technology pundits, I would prefer to get my hands on one before I start spouting opinions about it.

What I would like to point out however is Wall Street’s view of today’s product announcement. I noted that when the name was announced AAPL stock nosedived a bit, then slowly climbed as features were explained. Later when the price was announced (at a bit more than half where the pre-announcement speculation put the price tag) the stock marched right back up again. In my twitter stream it seemed only myself and Kevin van Haaren were commenting on the stock market’s reaction.

There are at least two months to go before the (real, not stock) market can begin to asses what this product can and will do. It will be interesting to observe the stock along the way. I generally have a very dim view of what Wall Street analysts think, as I see them of incapable of real analysis, completely out of touch with the real world, and far more prone to herd mentality than they’re willing to admit. Meanwhile, I wish Apple luck here though, as a customer and shareholder.

Seven Years in Two Photographs

Watching children grow up is like observing starfish. It happens so slowly that it is impossible to actually see it happen, but like watching that minute hand move on the big wall clock in fifth grade math class, while it happens almost imperceptibly, it does happen. Photography of course allows us to cheat time and observe moments from the past, and collected photos can form a sort of mental time lapse movie where suddenly those seemingly motionless starfish are wandering all over the tide pools.

In 2003 the entire Goolsbee family visited my parents, this included my two sisters and their families. At the time all four of the grandkids, that is my two boys and my two nieces, all just had braces put on their teeth. I snapped a photo to commemorate the situation:

L—R: Christopher, Nicholas, Lauren, & Caroline in winter 2003.

It is a cute photo and it ended up on the cover of one of those Apple iPhoto books I made for my parents of our week with them, which to this day enjoys a place on their living room table. The photo captures three of the four of them at the end of their childhoods and into their teens. Chris and Caroline were thirteen years old, Lauren was fifteen. The littlest is Nicholas, who was then just ten years old and as you can see the teenagers are all hunched over to match his height for the photo.

Fast-forward your metal time lapse to the end of 2009:

L—R: Christopher, Nicholas, Lauren, & Caroline in December 2009.

On our last day in Colorado over the Christmas holiday I rounded up all four the grandkids away from their iPods, school reading assignments, and laptops. The intent was to recreate the 2003 shot, with a little art direction from my sister using the original photo on the cover of my parents’ book. Chris & Nick are now over six feet tall. Their cousins, being their mother’s daughters (my sister Cathy is, shall we say… “vertically challenged”) remain about the height they were in 2003. Getting everyone’s head lined up was a bit of a challenge! Both nieces are in college now, with Lauren set to graduate in May. Chris is in college too, and Nick is a sophomore in high school. (Nicholas is also no longer the youngest and certainly not the “littlest” grandkid anymore as my youngest sister had a son 3 years ago.)

The intent of the photograph was to capture their smiles, and the results of all that orthodontics. What I see instead however is seven years of maturity reflected in these four faces. While they’ll always be our children, none of them is really a child anymore.

Datacenter Site Selection – Facebook in Prineville, Oregon

Average Industrial Power Rates per State

Facebook announced this week that they are building a datacenter in Prineville, Oregon.

Other than being the place of my wife’s birth, and the home of Les Schwab Tire Centers, why on earth would they choose to locate a high-tech industrial facility in Prineville, a tiny town in eastern Oregon far from any major metropolitan area? The reasons are simple, and boil down to two things: Cost of Electricity, and Climate.

Have a look at the map above. This represents the average cost of power to an industrial user on a per-state basis. I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: A datacenter is essentially a facility that transforms electricity into bits. Power goes in, bits come out. The by-product of this bit manufacturing process is heat. So power costs, and the ability to keep the facility cool are the two critical components of datacenter site selection. Those white states running through the map represent the lowest power costs.

While the cost to build a datacenter is staggering (~$2000 per square foot) the cost to operate it over time is daunting. Datacenters use a lot of electricity. Not just for powering the servers, but also to keep the environmental conditions correct for those servers. Computers don’t react well to dramatic changes in temperature and humidity, so a stable environment is critical. It takes as much, and often more power to maintain the datacenter environmental conditions as it does to power the servers. Locating the datacenter in a place with a naturally cool climate is a huge advantage due to the concept of “free cooling”… that is using naturally cool outside air to maintain the inside temps. We do this at digital.forest’s datacenter in Seattle. Outside air is used the majority of the time, year round. Only in daytimes during the summer do the mechanical cooling systems have to kick in and take over. You can’t do this in Houston, or even in most of California. So look at those white states and think about which ones have the reliably coolest climates.

Washington & Oregon.

Washington state has an advantage over Oregon in that power is less expensive here. Visionary companies started building datacenters near the large hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River about seven years ago. Microsoft and Yahoo near Quincy, VMware and T-mobile near Wenatchee. More were planned until our Attorney General, Rob McKenna declared that datacenters were not classified as “Manufacturing Facilities” and therefore not eligible for sales tax breaks on capital purchases tied to their construction. Given that it costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to build a datacenter, this action tipped the scales into Oregon’s favor. Even though the long term operating costs in Oregon may be slightly higher, the cost to build a facility is much, much lower as Oregon has no sales tax. This is likely why Facebook chose Oregon.

Construction will last for quite a while and inject $188 million dollars into the Oregon economy. Once in operation the facility will bring about 35 well-paying jobs (Facebook says 150% of the region’s prevailing wage) to the town of Prineville. For rural areas this can only be a good thing. So congrats to Facebook and Prineville, and let’s hope it is a long a fruitful relationship.

Datacenters are a growth industry of the future and will be a wonderful economic boost for rural communities east of the Cascades where traditional industries such as timber have all but vanished. I hope our politicians in Olympia have noted this and can get datacenter construction rolling again here in Washington.