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.
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!”
If you recall, last December we had a huge windstorm that felled a 103′ tall Douglas Fir tree in our back yard. This happened literally days after we finished the cleanup from the big snow storm a few weeks before. That storm had most of our trees breaking branches off and falling (due to the weight of the snow) and we hired a landscaper to come saw them up and put them into a huge pile. We tried to do it ourselves but it was just too much work and we are short on time and the tools required.
The tree was another matter. My friend and coworker Shawn Hammer came and sawed up the tree into manageable chunks a couple of months ago. The remaining work is to just split and stack it to dry for use as firewood (for next time we lose electricity for a week!) I can do this job myself. But unlike other jobs, where it was important for issues of safety or whatnot to get it done swiftly, this job can be done at a leisurely pace.
An odd fact about me is that I don’t really like power tools. I’m not a luddite by any stretch of the imagination, I just don’t really mind using hand tools for a task like this. I was thinking about this while I was splitting these very heavy logs with an axe, a splitting wedge, and a 5lb short sledge hammer; we invented power tools to make human effort scale to meet commercial need. Power tools enabled us to get things done more efficiently. In this case, efficiency would be a luxury, not a NEED. I don’t have to have this wood split and stacked anytime soon. It could literally wait forever. My family might not want to have this stuff littering our yard, but in reality there is no pressing need to get it done. So why haul in some gas-powered splitter or something? The physical act of using hand tools to do the job is so much more engaging for me mentally. Looking at the wood grain, and knots and finding the just right spot to place the wedge. That moment of Zen-like calm as I relax, adjust the grip on the handle of the Collins Axe as it dangles behind my back… concentrating on the spot of wood that I wish to strike, before snapping it through the arc and (hopefully) through the log just right. The rhythm of the hammer on the wedge, and the tell-tale changes in pitch as it digs deeper into the wood, and then changes again as the pressure releases and the splitting starts. You cannot get this sort of VARIABLE connection to a task when just feeding a machine. The rhythms of feeding machinery can be theraputic, but it isn’t quite the same as doing the work by hand.
So I wandered out after breakfast and spent the better part of the day splitting wood. After I started I thought it would be fun to capture it in a timelapse; so I went and set up my laptop and iSight camera on the deck and fired up iStopMotion and got what you see above. That is about four and a half hours of work, condensed into a few seconds. Sorry about the out of focus-ness about it, but the iSight is obviously not really meant to be a long-range lens! My duct tape “tripod” also failed me, as you can see the camera shifted over time.
You can see the logs vanishing from the lower right and the pile of split wood growing in the upper right as the day goes on. Each log segment would yield about eight bits of firewood after splitting. I vanish about a third of the way in for a while… off to the barn to sharpen the splitting wedge (with a Dremel tool… see I’m not completely averse to power tools!) I’m also joined by Nick & Sue later in the day, and eventually they convince me to stop and go inside (but not until I split two more logs!) Sue brought me some iced tea at one point, and she runs the mower for a while too. Nick helps collect and stack the wood for me. The dogs just wander around being useless… and occasionally steal bits of wood to chew on. Christopher is no doubt very happy to be six-thousand miles away right now, or he’d be helping me too!
I managed to get over half of it done, so maybe next weekend I can wrap it up. Then we’ll have to stack the big pile.
The camera is pointing SW.
You would think that I’d be really sore, but I’m not. We’ll see what tomorrow brings! It helps that I’m ambidextrous (another little known fact about me: I can do just about everything with either hand. I write right-handed, as for some reason when I write left-handed I write backwards. The handwriting looks pretty much identical, but just backwards. I can draw, paint, play sports, swing a hammer or use other hand tools, operate a mouse, etc with either hand just fine. I usually go months at a time using the mouse with one hand or another… then suddenly switch. Lately I’ve been mousing lefty.) For me there is a sort of mental switch of gears when I change hands… it is really an adjustment to how I SEE things more than concentrating on my arms and hands. This allows me to work longer at things like swinging a hammer as I can just swap hands if I get tired. I never told my dad that when I was a teenager though. Funny how that works. 😉
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.
I just now learned via Mitch’s blog that Kurt Vonnegut has died. Very sad.
His gentle humor inspired me as a young adult. My son Chris has become as voracious a reader as I was at his age. I’m compelled now to create a care-package of Vonnegut books to send to him in Chile. That is probably the best thing I could do to honor Vonnegut’s memory.
I actually had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Vonnegut, ironically at Texas Tech when I was a student there. He was wonderfully entertaining and very informative. He spoke as well as he wrote. There are several passages from his books which are firmly lodged in my imagination, particularly from Deadeye Dick, Slaughterhouse Five, and Galapagos. They spring into my thoughts constantly and make me smile, or ponder.
Today is Christopher’s 17th birthday. It is the first time he has been away from home on this day of the year. He’s 10,000 kilometers (6000+ miles) away. We’re going to call him later tonight.
I thought I’d share some photos of him over the years, in context of the usual subjects here on my website. The above photo was him in 4th grade, heading off to school in Wanborough, Wilts. Behind him is our trusty Volvo 440TD, a nice little Diesel car we owned in the UK.
Below are a bunch of photos taken on various rallies (some you have seen before), with Chris doing his usual stellar job of TSD Navigator. He’s REALLY good at it.
I miss you Chris!
Above: on the Deception Pass Bridge during the Tulip Rallye.
Above: Seattle Jag Club “Fall Colors Tour”
Above two: on the annual Poppy Rally in British Columbia. Due to weather issues, we took the Jetta!
I’m by no means all that interested in my orbital position in the “blogosphere”… at all. I don’t really consider this a “blog” so much as an extension of the website I started way back in 1997. That site’s original purpose, to share with our friends photos and text of my family’s life while we were overseas, has remained true. Though we’ve been back in the USA now for over eight years, and my family has opted out of participating (for the most part. Sue watches WAY TOO MUCH TV and has bought into the whole “Internet is rife with stalkers and ID thieves!” paranoia that the news media espouses CONSTANTLY) so the site is more about sharing my photos and text with my friends.
There are a bunch of you who participate right here, via the comments. There is an even larger bunch of you, who just email me directly, maintaining a sort of asynchronous communication channel, me outbound via HTTP and you inbound via SMTP. I’m OK with that too. The majority of folks in that latter category are the folks I’ve been communicating with for a LONG time. Old habits die hard I guess.
As it is, I figure that I have about 30 to 50 people, that I know personally who view this site on a regular basis. I’ve even “met” some people via this website, but none of them “face to face” so far. There are likely a few hundred folks who wander by, one offs… compulsive link followers who get here via clicking my name in another website’s comments area probably. You can measure my hits in the thousands… so I’m not cultivating a following, a technorati ranking, or any sort of revenue. If you EVER see advertising on this site, even google ads, you know it has been hijacked or something! I just can’t lower myself to “monetize” my friends. I really do see this as a form of personal communication.
So where am I going with this?
Today I was helping my staff work on deploying a frequently requested technology, and we were using this server as a guinea pig. I wondered how I, or more specifically our customers, would be able to gather data on this so I peeked at my stats. The image above snapped my head back a bit. SOMETHING I posted this month got a BUNCH of traffic. Since I do not have my stats tweaked to show granular data (remember, I really don’t care about them mostly) it took some digging and postulating to figure out what.
So it looks like the torrent of traffic started on the 14th. Looking back, the ONLY thing I can see that started that was my “William Fucking Shatner” story.
Must be the word “fucking” in there because I don’t see any incoming links for that page. So here is a hint for all you traffic whores (that means YOU John! 😉 ) use the word “fucking” a lot. heh.
