Category: Technology

Shifting Gears in my reading habits…

I finished Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Thanks John W!) last weekend. A truly fascinating read. I grazed through the Goolsbee bookshelves to grab something else and my eyes fell upon something I hadn’t read in years (since it came out in the 80s actually!) … I instinctively grabbed it and shoved it in my pocket as I drove off to work one morning. It is Douglas Adams’ Life, The Universe and Everything.

I only started reading it yesterday, and I’m already halfway through. I LOVE Adams’ writing style. It is wonderfully entertaining to read. I’m inspired by him, truly. I love to write and wish I could write half as well as Douglas Adams. I’d love to be able to somehow channel Adams & Eagan when I write my rally reports and stories. While I’m usually confident in my photography, I know my writing is nowhere near these two greats. I guess I’ll just keep trying.

A thoroughly enjoyable diversion from my usual serious reading.

As a side note, I actually one day found myself standing next to Douglas Adams. I can not really claim to have met him, though we exchanged exactly four words. (mind you that was far more than my other New York/Celebrity encounter – the infamous William Fucking Shatner!) I was at Macworld Expo in New York City in July of 2000. I was scheduled to speak at the MacIT conference later that week (with Ron Marx and John Welch) and my speaker badge afforded an AMAZING seat at the Steve Jobs Keynote. I was in the sixth row. This was the famous G4 Cube/no-button mouse/free mouse Keynote. After the speech concluded most of the attendees stampeded the exits like Wildebeests lurching from a Crocodile to collect their free mouse. However the real geeks clamored to the front of the stage to get photos of the newly announced product. Freebies can wait… there are Cubes to undress with our eyes!

crush

Since I was sitting right up at the front, I ambled up there too. I stood back a bit to have a look at the Cube (a truly elegant machine, I still have one on my desk at work!) and noted a rather tall man at my right elbow wedged between me and my friend Chris Kilbourn. “Quite nice” I said to him nodding at the machine. “mmm Yes” he replied, his eyes still glued in techno-lust at the gleaming Cube. I took a second glance and recognized him as Adams! I shot a photo – and despite look of this shot, it wasn’t as stalkerish as it appears… there were literally hundreds of people in a huge semi-circle, with flashes going off like crazy.

Douglas Adams

Tragically, within a year, he was dead. 🙁

I introduced my sons to his genius not long after, and this copy I grabbed belongs to my youngest son Nick. Next up will have to be “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish!”…

How many geeks does it take…

…to move a 6800lb (~3000kg) UPS?

Thanks to the amazing Hilman Rollers, only four and a half.

This is our new UPS at digital.forest. It is an MGE EPS 7000, which is a very cool unit. As purchased it is a 300 kVA system, but as we grow we can scale it up to 500 kVA. The battery cabinets arrive tomorrow. You can read about the UPS arrival on my blog at work.

Published, again.

I wrote a lengthy bit about communications as a key to surviving an IT disaster, which in many ways was a written version of the session I delivered at the MacIT conference at Macworld Expo last month. I tackle the stereotype of geeks as poor communicators, and lay out a strategy for getting IT departments into the communication habit. The stunning revelation that lead me down this road is a conclusion I came to when discussing an outage with a “layperson”… that is a user of technology rather than a maintainer of it. To him awareness was more important than downtime. Downtime didn’t bother him so much, so long as he was kept informed of what was going on, why, and when things would be back up. Forewarning would be even better. His downtime came about during a datacenter migration. A light bulb went off over my head, as I had successfully pulled off more than one datacenter migration within the past few years. Did everything go perfectly? Of course not, but the difference was that I put a huge emphasis on communication with our customers way before, before, during, and after the moves. I’m not some IT genius by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m not the first to use this tool effectively. It just seems that most IT professionals forget this critical part of their management strategy.

Anyway, for the terminally curious, the series is linked below. My editor wisely split it into two parts.

Part One

Part Two

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain!

The server that hosts a lot of my images is down. It is my own personal box, which is almost as “vintage” as the cars it displays. It is a wonder that it works at all to be honest… clean living in a clean room I guess.

It had a minor disk issue earlier this morning and I’ve fixed it, but now I’m making a backup before I bring it back online. “Have patients!” …said the Mad Doctor! 😉

Update: OK, as of 11:45 Pacific Standard Time the image server is back online.

Out of the Office

I will be out of the office for the next week, out of town, and LIKELY to be not doing much writing or posting here for the next seven days or so.

I’m heading down to San Francisco to Macworld Conference & Expo. I’m teaching a 2-day session called “Total Network Awareness” in the Conference along with my colleagues John, Julian, & Shaun. It should be a GREAT session, as these guys really know their stuff, (except me of course… I’m only there for comic relief) When I last chatted online with Shaun & Julian they were a tad nervous, but John & I are the sort that can stand in front of people and ramble on for days about stuff, so I know we’ll be fine. Shaun & I especially work well together, having presented together now for several years. I know that if I so much as pause, he can finish my thought for me, and vice versa. The only difference this time is that instead of cramming everything into 90 minutes (the four of us did this session last year as a 90 minute one) we have TWO FULL days to lay it all out. I’m really glad about this because last year we literally FLEW through the material and barely made it… and the audience was gasping with questions at the end on *particulars*… That is good because that means they understood the big stuff and wanted details as to HOW to implement. This year we can actually walk them through doing it.

I’m also speaking again on Thursday at the MacIT Conference along with Dave Pooser The Puking Presenter, and (again) John Welch on a panel I’ve created for the purposes of talking about IT Disasters. Should be fun.

Apple could release something earth-shattering, and I may be tempted to comment on it here… otherwise, just talk amongst yourselves for a while because I’ll be busy.

Another Registry!

BeBox!

To add one of my obscure bits of hardware to: The BeBox Registry.

I literally stumbled upon this site this morning, as I was considering putting the old box up on eBay or something. You see I have a rather vast collection of odd computer hardware stashed away in a few places. Mostly Non-Intel CPU workstations and servers. One of these is a BeBox. About 1800 of these were built and I managed to snag one from a friend of mine about 8 years ago (Hi Jeff!)

…

Then I came to my senses… I can’t put this on eBay. What I have is a collection of obscure, high-end systems from the 90s. These are the last gasp of non-Intel driven errata before that branch of computing lost its momentum. I have PPC, Motorola 68K, Sun Sparc, MIPS and Alpha boxes. I imagine if you liken the pre-PC era like the Brass Era of automobiles, these machines are like the explosion of brands pre-WW2. I have the computing equivalent of Auburns, Cords, Dusenbergs, REOs, Pierce-Arrows and the like. Names like Be, NeXT, SGI, Sun, and of course Apple. They are like used cars now, like those REOs in the 40s; old cars from failed, or merged into some larger entity companies, whose usefulness is gone and whose parts are unavailable. They have little value now, but it should grow over time. I even have a few “one of a kind” machines – unshipped prototypes.

So no eBay. Instead I’ll catalog them here over time. (You’ll note I created a new category for this subject .) Should be fun.