Category: Technology

I love my job.

Kevin Teker gets tanked!

Where else can you mix the ultimate in high- & low-tech?

Have a look at my latest post on our support blog. This blog is mostly used to communicate scheduled maintenance and server issues to our clients. I started using it to communicate more operational detail when we went through our big facility move in 2005. You can read a sample post here.

Since then I’ve tried to let all our clients peek behind the curtain as it were at least once a month. Big issues, such as when one of the compressors in our HVAC system failed, or when we finished our recent datacenter expansion. Service affecting issues like a snow storm that may have prevented support staff from getting to the office. Our even small issues worth sharing such as this.

Datacenter Caption Contest

sorry... no pretty geeks here

In the tradition of “Fake Steve Jobs I’d like to do a caption contest.

We have a very nice datacenter facility, and a local photography studio asked us to use it to capture some images for sale as stock photography. They spent a half-day in our facility with, models and lights, and a stylist taking over our conference room for makeup, plus one of us d.f geeks watching their every move in the facility to make sure they didn’t touch anything the wrong way!

I found it funny what they chose to shoot, and where they chose to shoot. For some reason they were obsessed with this particular part of the facility. It is a “hot aisle” meaning the backsides of the servers are all pointed inward here. The HVAC systems dump cold air on the front sides and a return removes the hot air from above. It is also the “ugly” side of both of the aisles. Power and network cables everywhere and of course all that hot air blowing on you. It is also a part of the datacenter where our “single server” colocation customers are housed. This means that the variety of hardware is astounding. This of course makes cable management a real PITA. I’m not particularly proud of this view, but what can I say? They took some good shots, which have ironically turned up in print advertising and websites of our competitors! Gotta love that. I’ll share more shots later, but let’s talk about this one.

Anyway, whenever I see stock photography in a “geek” context it really stands out to me. I mean NONE of the geeks that I know and certainly none of them that work at digital.forest are this attractive. 😉 None of them have clothes this nice. None of them have this level of … what shall we say… “personal grooming.” And most importantly, none of them have two X chromosomes.

So my caption would read “We are too attractive to work here!”

What would your caption say?

blast from the past

What house is this?

I was looking for a VERY old bit of software in order to open some very old files over the weekend, and I stumbled upon a CD-ROM that was an image of a 120mb hard drive out of my Mac IIsi… which I haven’t seen since 1994 or so. Back in 1994 or so I worked for a Fortune 500 company (IIRC it was #50 on the list that year.) I actually worked for a department of a division of that company… but anyway we had big budgets to spend on IT gear, and I was the IT guy. One of the things we had was a CD-ROM burner, which back then was a very exotic “bit of kit”, at the Brits say. We archived our work on CD-ROM and so we bought a burner. Thirteen years ago CD-ROM burners cost about $20,000 and blank discs were around $20 a pop. I remember being thrilled when we were able to buy them in bulk for $17 a disc. Well, I’m happy to say that unlike today’s CHEAP CD-ROM burners and media, the high-dollar Kodak burned media lasted the thirteen years quite well! I have a complete and readable copy of a hard drive from that old Mac IIsi. So I started looking around that old data, and I figured I would share some.

First off, is that photo above. I’m the guy on the right in case you didn’t recognize me. 😉
The real question for you pop-culture mavens out there is: can you name the location? If you are of a certain age, it should be plainly obvious. Everyone in that shot is 30-something then, and is 40-something now, so think back to our teen years and take your guess in the comments section.

I also found some old emails. Some humor is timeless, and here’s an email joke from the past. If you are offended by clinical terms to describe anatomy, stop reading and grow up! If you are a geek of a certain sort, have a look at the ASCII context surrounding the message body and unearth the hidden contextual nuggets. Feel free to quiz me about them in the comments. Don’t worry about the revealed email address… Robert Hess is quite dead, so he’s unlikely to get any spam due to my posting this. I was one of Robert’s beta testers for his wonderful AppleShare admin tool “Shaman” or as it was later known “Sharing Stone”. Robert was a uniquely funny guy, but I doubt this joke originated with him. He and I were very different people, but I enjoy having friends who are very different from me. I really enjoyed the emails we exchanged… both as dev/tester, and as journalist/unnamed source. 😉 There are a group of us that gather every year at Macworld Expo… the roster changes slightly every year. Robert & I always met up for lunch the first day… usually made entertaining by a wild ride in his car. It was shocking when he died so suddenly… at least not in a fiery car crash. Anyway… here is a blast from the past:


Item 6557845 17-June-94 17:10
From: ROBERT_HESS@MACWEEK.ZIFF.COM@INTERNET#
To: KUECHLE1  Kuechle, Scott
X0357  Microspot, World HQ,GB,IDV
CDA0858  Laser Expressions, N Soltz,PAS
EL.GRANDE  -> DAVE.WINER UserLand SW, David Winer,PAS
JMPDUDE  Puckett, Mike
THEBONMARCHE  The Bon Marche, C Goolsbee,APD
SEIWA.PUBLSH  Seiwa Computing Sys,JHAlexander,PAS
SANTORINI  Santorini Consulting & Design,PRT
SLIPSTREAM  Slipstream Solution, A J Alt,PAS

INTERNET# Document Id: 199406171609.AA13005@ncrpda.curtin.edu.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sub: Why The Internet Is Like A

---- Internet E-mail Header ----
From: "Robert Hess" - robert_hess@macweek.ziff.com
Message-Id: 199406171609.AA13005@ncrpda.curtin.edu.au
Sender: shaman@ncrpda.curtin.edu.au
Precedence: bulk
X-Listserver-Version: 6.0 -- UNIX ListServer by Anastasios Kotsikonas
Reply-To: robert_hess@macweek.ziff.com
Errors-To: robert_hess@macweek.ziff.com
Originator: shaman
To: Multiple recipients of list - shaman @ncrpda.curtin.edu.au

Mail*Link(r) SMTP Why The Internet Is Like A Penis
It can be up or down. It's more fun when it's up, but it makes it hard to get any real work done.
In the long-distant past, its only purpose was to transmit information considered vital to the survival of the species. Some people still think that's the only thing it should be used for, but most folks today use it for fun most of the time.
It has no conscience and no memory. Left to its own devices, it will just do the same damn dumb things it did before.
It provides a way to interact with other people. Some people take this interaction very seriously, others treat it as a lark. Sometimes it's hard to tell what kind of person you're dealing with until it's too late.
If you don't apply the appropriate protective measures, it can spread viruses.
It has no brain of its own. Instead, it uses yours. If you use it too much, you'll find it becomes more and more difficult to think coherently.
We attach an importance to it that is far greater than its actual size and influence warrant.
If you're not careful what you do with it, it can get you in big trouble.
It has its own agenda. Somehow, no matter how good your intentions, it will warp your behavior. Later you may ask yourself "why on earth did I do that?"
Some folks have it, some don't.
Those who have it would be devastated if it were ever cut off. They think that those who don't have it are somehow inferior. They think it gives them power. They are wrong.
Those who don't have it may agree that it's a nifty toy, but think it's not worth the fuss that those who do have it make about it. Still, many of those who don't have it would like to try it.
Once you've started playing with it, it's hard to stop. Some people would just play with it all day if they didn't have work to do.

R.I.P. Robert.

Insightful Comment. Slashdot | Preparing for the Worst in IT

I was reading an article link on Slashdot which was talking about the “threat of outages on major Internet infrastructure” in general, and specifically about the “carrier hotel” in Los Angeles named “One Wilshire”. Every major city in the civilized world has at least one building like this. Here in Seattle it is “The Westin Building” (Ironically NOT the Westin Hotel buildings, but the old headquarters building for the hotel chain when it was located here in Seattle, before it shuffled off to New York after a string of M&A action. The Westin is a Carrier Hotel, not an actual hotel.)

Of all the threats that I can list in ACTUAL LIKELIHOOD that put a carrier hotel at risk, “terrorist attack” is not even in the top ten. (“Human Error” is always going to be Numero Uno. Nothing borks up things faster than error-prone human beings!) But for some dumb reason, everyone gets completely fixated on the possibility of a “terror attack on the Internet” in the form of a concentrated effort to “take out” a carrier hotel.

This is completely ludicrous. I will explore this lunacy in a future post (in my newly created “datacenter” category), but I wanted to point out a remarkably insightful comment I read on the /. link. It so well summarizes both the fearmongering I’ve grown REALLY tired of, and expresses the fundamental reality of American Life right now… meaning, “we’re over the shock of the event itself, and we’re tired of it being used to justify lunacy.” Read on…

Slashdot | Preparing for the Worst in IT
Sixteen days after 9/11 my daughter was born, it scared the shit out of me. I wondered if I would be drafted for war, I wondered if she would, one day go to war, I wondered if one day she would have to prepare for terrorist attacks in school, I wondered if she would be snuffed out two weeks into life by some nasty man made virus, I wondered if the virus had already been released and we just didn’t know it yet, I thought a lot about my daughter’s future and how I would raise her to deal with it. I was thoroughly terrified of the future.
Looking back on all of that I realize that Americans did more to terrify ourselves than the enemy ever could have. We’ve lost thousands of soldiers and spent billions of dollars in this war on terror and we are only more terrified, it doesn’t make us safer, it doesn’t keep the power on, we’re not flying safer, our water, internet, phones, roads, schools, our children are not safer, and hell we don’t even feel safer. It’s all at risk now, because we’ve spent all of our money and time trying to lock things down, keep things safe and protect ourselves from the boogeymen.
Today, my daughter is five, she can read, tie her shoes, and does well with math. She doesn’t know what a terrorist is and they don’t talk about that in school. Her little brother is also doing great, neither has gone hungry or lonely or cold a day in their lives and we still haven’t finished our Y2K rations. They know only one thing about politics and it’s that George W. Bush is a dumb ass. They also know what consumerism is and the ways that the TV can affect them.
I’m sick of hearing about terrorists and terrorism. I’m not scared of a terrorist attack and in fact, I’d rather be scared than watch another one of our civil liberties gobbled up by the administration or watch another funeral on the news. I’m so fucking sick of hearing about this “post 9/11” bullshit, that I could scream. We weren’t safe “pre 9/11” and there isn’t a fucking thing we can do to become safe in a post 9/11 world. Get over it. Life is fragile and raising your children in a bubble will not make them safer. In fact, once they inevitably leave that bubble they will not be able to survive the harsh reality that is “fresh air”. So thanks George W. for a nation that cannot move without asking themselves WWTTD? (What Would The Terrorists Do?)

Well said. It is a good starting point and frame of reference for my “why terrorists won’t attack the Internet” rant… coming soon.

Housekeeping

OK, so the sharp-eyed among you may have noticed a bit of a shake-up in the blogroll.

I’ve removed a couple of links. Bill Dickson’s server died, so he’s gone 404. I also removed Peter Lalor, since he actually died last October. I figured it was time to retire his link. Not that I’ll forget him or anything, just that his website is for all intents and purposes static. On that note I was staring at my iChat buddy list today and realized I have three dead people on it. 2006 was a hard one for me in that respect as I lost three good people. I don’t know why I chose today to remove them from my binary interfaces… it just happened. Oh well.

Anyway, I added some other links. Other friends, other websites I read, etc. Car stuff of course. Some datacenter links too. I read this stuff every day as it is the industry I live and work in. Some of you may find it interesting… or not. Just more stuff that when concatenated is chuck goolsbee.

Chuqui 3.0: Instead of buying a zune…

Chuqui 3.0: Instead of buying a zune…

“Thinking of buying a zune? Well, surprisingly enough, according to Amazon, 10% of the people who looked at a Zune instead went off and bought a 16×10 two person camping tent. That’s either a lot of tents, or a really small number of views and sales. I know which I’m betting on.”

After I got over my shock of seeing Chuq von Rospach post a blog entry at some other time than a-minute-before-midnight (an in-joke between us), I chuckled at his quote above.

I remember last year before the Zune launch and every media outlet was posing the question “Will this kill the iPod?”… I said, over and over (never here, but in other blog comments and various mailing lists) that the Zune would be a non-starter. A failure. The “Bob” of this decade.

While Tech Punditry isn’t my gig, I felt pretty confident on this prediction.

Looks like Amazon has sold about 100 of ’em. 😉