Month: December 2008

-4°F/-20°C

-4°F/-20°C in Arlington, WA right now. Likely colder here at Chez Goolsbee. Easily the coldest weather we’ve ever seen in the decade we’ve lived here.

I’m running a timelapse out the kitchen window. Captured the sunrise, and should get weird when the wind arrives later today!

Meanwhile I’m digging out and stacking firewood in preparation for the inevitable power outage we’ll experience once the wind picks up.

Here is a photo I took of the boys on Thursday before we left for the airport. They called last night and are having fun… skiing with their grandparents.

Stuck

This winter storm has hit us pretty hard. We have about 2 feet of snow at my house. I had to spend the night at work last night… finally came home about 2 pm. The roads were “ok” … mostly packed snow. I made it 62 miles from my office to my driveway. I rolled the car right into the same spot I dug it out of two days before… then thought I should turn it around so I could exit. Boy was that a dumb idea!

I backed up, could not get it oriented properly, then slid off into the deep snow. It sunk up past the door sills and stopped. The body was high-centered on snow… no traction and could not “rock” it at all.

I think I’m stuck here until it thaws. 🙁

December Sunrise at digital.forest

The past two days have been a bit surreal. Seattle got socked with a big snow, not long after our big snow up in the foothills. The boys arrived safely in Colorado for their holiday visit to their Grandparents… but I got stuck at the office Thursday night as snow piled up all around us. The roads were insane, which I could plainly see outside my office window. A small sub-set of the staff made it to the office and it was a light-hearted fun day and night. I awoke before dawn this morning and seeing that it was clearing, ran outside and setup my time-lapse gear to grab the above footage. I decided after the sun rose to add a twist to the movie by “sliding” down the hill, making a two-layer set of movement in the video. My camera mount did not allow for smooth movement so it is not as good as it should be but I’ll get that sorted out.

Later I had to post on our support blog about our staffing situation and figured I’d throw the video on there for good measure.

Sorry… been a bad few days.

Started mid-week… Got some bad news (I can’t really talk about.)

Then it started snowing. Never a good thing here in the Pacific Northwest.

Then my laptop died. The old G4 I’ve been driving for over 4 years. I installed the 10.5.6 update and it just rolled over and died. Kernel panic, SPOD, you name it. I tried restoring from backup. I tried re-installing. I even “nuked & paved”… SPOD & Kernel Panic. Sigh. It frustrated me so much that after the last failed re-install I applied some “percussive maintenance” and then tossed it across the room. As you can imagine, it did not take that very well.

I awoke this morning at 4, to over a foot of new snow. The Jetta spent the night in the front of the house, uncovered, as Sue’s CRD and the Jag are sleeping in the garage these days. The boys had a 12:40 flight to catch at Sea-Tac, 70 miles away. I started shovelling out the VW from the drift. I started right up despite the cold. I let it warm up while I got the Liberty CRD out and used it to clear a path down the 1/3rd of a mile down to the road for the Jetta. A couple of laps up and down the drive cleared the snow sufficiently. I packed a shovel, some gloves, and boots, along with the boys’ luggage into the car. The boys awakened and fed, we headed off towards the airport around 8. Once down off the hill and onto the freeway the roads were in much better shape. Still snow covered, but plowed, sanded, and well packed. We were able to move along at a good rate. The snow started again in earnest when we reached downtown Seattle. We arrived in a blizzard, with 2 hours to spare, got them checked in, and then I headed off to the Apple Store at Southcenter to pick up a new laptop.

The parking lot was empty, so I had a little fun doing handbrake turns and generally hooning about for a bit to improve my mood.

Grabbed a MacBook Pro. Most people would be thrilled about this. I was just grumpy.

Drove to my office through and around closed freeways, accidents, jack-knifed semis, and idiots.

Spent the rest of my day configuring a new machine and transferring my data to it. I have plenty of backups, and was able to restore an image of my previous laptop to an external hard drive yesterday. Moving to the new machine SHOULD be easy with Migration Assistant? Forget it. Failed twice.

Had to move everything over by hand. Still dealing with the fallout of that. iPhoto is the issue I’m dealing with at the moment. Sigh.

BastionHost Buys Nova Scotia Data Bunker « Data Center Knowledge

Future Home of a Colocation Facility?

BastionHost Buys Nova Scotia Data Bunker « Data Center Knowledge.

I always do a “rollseyes” when I see these “Datacenter in a Cold War Bunker” stories. One because they are just silly when they tout the “can survive a nuclear strike” capabilities… look, if ICBM’s are falling out of the sky, we’ve got much bigger problems than website uptime!

But wait... I need my email!!!

Second, the facilities in question were designed to house PEOPLE, not datacenters. The power & cooling infrastructure is designed to support something like 90 Watts per square foot at MOST. Datacenter these days wants 500 Watts per square foot minimum. Additionally, the infrastructure is all over FORTY YEARS OLD!

Dude, your draining the amps I need to run the cages next door, knock it off!

To relate it to something most of my readers can understand, that is like asking a early or mid-60s race car to be competitive today. First you have to completely restore it, rebuild it with all manner of modern upgrades, then watch as the new cars pass you like you are going backwards.

Sure the James Bond Supervillian image is cool for about 30 seconds. But after that, you have a facility that can never truly compete without dumping cubic tons of money into it.

This market can’t support the “bunker” model unless the grid power available to it is dirt cheap, and you’ve basically gutted the bunker and completely rebuilt it. At that point what do you have that is competitive?

Oh yeah, nuclear strike survival. When that becomes a selling point I’m getting out of this business.