Month: May 2007

cables & conduits

cables

conduit

I love looking up when in our datacenter and seeing all the well-ordered cable and conduit… for some reason it is very visually appealing. The camera can not adequately capture it because wider-angle lenses distort the straight lines, and longer focal lengths just capture a small slice of the wonder.

Big Fiber and Electrical conduits all bent around like an exhaust manifold…
Hundreds of strands of UTP all bundled and laced…
Big DC power busses neatly arrayed…
Fiber-optic cables and innerducts going hither and yon…

call me weird, but I could stare at this stuff all day long.

Ducks & Senators in the Stanley Cup final

The Ducks eliminated the Red Wings tonight in the NHL Western Conference finals. I can’t comment too much on the series since I really only watched the playoff out of one eye after the Canucks were eliminated (by the Ducks). I really wanted the Canucks to go all the way, especially with the way Luongo was playing, but alas, the Ducks were just unstoppable. They are young, and fast, and relentless, and Giguerre is playing as good as Luongo with a better team in front of him to boot. If you are going to go down, it is best to have the guys who beat you go all the way though, right? I’m happy with the outcome.

I also half-watched (OK… 1/8th watched) the Ottawa Senators work their way through the Eastern series. They had it easier than any team in the West. I loved seeing them finish on top, dispatching team such as the Devils and Sabres. As much as I’d like to see the Cup return to Ottawa (They last won it in 1927, and 18 times before that going back to 1903 or so) I have a feeling they are no match for the Ducks.

It is 2,785 miles between the two cities, and it will be interesting to see how that long travel distance affects the series.

Geography Trivia: I live in the “lower 48” and I am NORTH of Ottawa… by several hundred miles.

Christopher’s mail from Chile

pacifica

Two packages arrived from Chile this week. Mostly books which Christopher has read and doesn’t want/need to carry them back home in his luggage. It also contained a memory card from his camera, filled with almost 500 pictures. Unfortunately, it appears his camera was damaged not long after he arrived in Chile, and the focussing mechanism isn’t working well. Most of the photos are blurry. 🙁

There are a few choice ones though, and I’ll share them here.

Chris in Chile

Above: Christopher about a week after he arrived in Chile, and camping on the beach with his host family

Yayo

Above: This is Gerardo, Christopher’s host father. “Yayo” as he is known, speaks very good English and he and I have conversed a lot over the past several months. Gerardo was an exchange student himself, in North Carolina, when he was in high school, so he understands a lot of what Chris is experiencing. I owe a great debt to Gerardo, as from what I can tell he is doing a wonderful job with Chris.

Yayo y Lorena

Above: This is Yayo and Lorena. Lorena is Chris’ host mother. She speaks about as much English as I do Spanish, so the one time she and I spoke on the phone was… hilarious. We both spoke slowly and loudly, and neither of us understood a word, other than “Christopher” and “Gerardo”. 😉

I have bought Chris another camera, which I will send down to him next week, along with his memory card. I think I also need to provide a little long distance Art Direction, as most of his shots fail to capture what people want to see. Of course, I look at my photography when I was 17, and it wasn’t much better. But then again, I had some people teach me how to compose and what not, so now is the time I guess. I do really like the shot at the top here of the sand and sun. It is a very evocative photo for me. Looking at it in context of the pictures taken at the same time though, you can see that it is a happy compositional accident… just one image in a series of sweeping panorama shots. The key to good photography is SEEING what is in the viewfinder as a complete image. We’ll see how that concept can be transmitted 10,000km via email!

I will post the rest of Chris’ photos from Chile later on today, with a password protecting them, to share with friends and family.

Burger King Bunch

67 vette

Here in the sleepy town of Arlington, WA, the dairies and sawmills may be quiet, but the parking lot of the local Burger King out on Highway 9 rumbles to the roar of old cars every Saturday evening. They call themselves “The Burger King Bunch” and are the closest thing we have here to a car club.

I spent the day pressure washing our back deck, which was filthy with debris and dirt from our very stormy winter. We ate an early dinner and Nick & I took off afterwards in the Jaguar to head to BK to see what was on display this week. The 65E is fresh from the paint shop, looking REAL good again. My self-inflicted clear-coat divot has been fixed, and I even came away with a nice tub of color-matched touch-up paint to take care of the many little chips and dings elsewhere on the car, now and in the future. I am very happy with Steve Velez and his staff at Accurate Lines Collision down in Marysville for the excellent job they did on the repair. Unlike the last paint repair I had done to the Jaguar, everything promised was delivered this time… ON TIME, on budget, and looking great. They even took the time to hit just about every ding and bit of road-rash on the passenger side of the car. If you are anywhere in western Washington and looking for a good body & paint shop I highly recommend them.

Anyway, Nick took a pile of coins off into the Burger King to get a shake, while I wandered off to photograph cars. The turnout was pretty light, as some dark clouds had just blown through (we almost didn’t go, but my weather widgets in my MacOS dashboard told me no rain was aimed at us in the next few hours). There were two cars that really turned my crank though. One was that liquid black, with red highlights ’67 Corvette 427. I own a black car and know how hard they are to keep looking good, and this one looked great.

The other treat was a ’51(?) Nash Statesman. You can’t find a more emblematic “Yank Tank” than this! Big, bulbous and green… just like a Sherman Tank.

Yank Tank

You can find all the photos I shot tonight here.

Published!

my photo

A photo of mine has been chosen as the cover shot for the 300 Star Letter, the magazine of the Gull Wing Group. The Gull Wing Group is a US-based club of 300sl owners… something I don’t qualify for, so I’m not a member. My parents are members though, and I got that photograph while co-driving their ’57 300sl roadster in the 2004 Colorado Grand. My father called me yesterday when his arrived. He saw the shot and at first thought: wow, that is JUST LIKE a classic “Chuck” photograph! Then he recognized the #47 from their car and knew it was an ACTUAL “Chuck” shot, and called me.

Funny thing is, I don’t recall granting permission for the photograph to be used in such a manner. Mind you I may have forgotten. I’ll have to dig around in my email to see.

Here is the original, untouched, uncropped image:

nice shot

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.