Car Photo of the Day: Still Life with M-16

As many of you know, I’m not a big fan of car shows. It all boils down to the fact that to me the natural habitat of an automobile is on the road. Static displays detract from the object’s purpose. Overlay the static display with judging, and all sorts of unrelated to cars – but ingrained in human behavior shenanigans ensue.

One such set of shenanigans are cutesy decorations. Those bizarro “leaning kid” dolls lie atop this pile, followed closely by Elvis mannequins, and drive-in trays with plastic burgers on them. Restoration photo books are one thing, as they are at least directly related to what you are looking at, as are period-correct materials about the history of the machine. Lying somewhere between these two extremes is captured above. This display is in a weird grey area between “period correct accessories” and “too cute” (if you could call it that!) I saw this vehicle at the only car show I regularly attend, which is the one put on every June by my little home town of Arlington, WA. I feel like it is important to “show the colors” so to speak and bring my car if I can. Militaria is always sort of an oddball category anyway, and the guys that collect these machines are a tad wacky. The car show organizers never have a judging category for them, so they end up pooled with other oddball (meaning not STOCK OR HOT-ROD DOMESTIC VEHICLES FROM 1925 THROUGH 1975… they always manage to squeeze 20 judging categories out of THAT group!) machines … such as imports, and race cars, and other miscellanea lumped into a giant pot called “Specialty Cars.” Of course guys with 69 Camaros and C2 Corvettes also throw themselves into “Specialty Cars” because they feel like they have a better chance of winning there… go figure. See what I mean about shenanigans?

Anyway the poor Jeep and armored car guys don’t have a hope in hell of winning anything so they usually just congregate in small, camouflaged groups and look a little PTSD’ed. This particular year though this one guy made a run at success with a full-blown Vietnam Era accessory display. If he’d pulled off a hovering Huey squadron he may have won Best of Show, but I think he struck out with just a toy M-16.

Datacenter Site Selection – Facebook in Prineville, Oregon

Average Industrial Power Rates per State

Facebook announced this week that they are building a datacenter in Prineville, Oregon.

Other than being the place of my wife’s birth, and the home of Les Schwab Tire Centers, why on earth would they choose to locate a high-tech industrial facility in Prineville, a tiny town in eastern Oregon far from any major metropolitan area? The reasons are simple, and boil down to two things: Cost of Electricity, and Climate.

Have a look at the map above. This represents the average cost of power to an industrial user on a per-state basis. I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: A datacenter is essentially a facility that transforms electricity into bits. Power goes in, bits come out. The by-product of this bit manufacturing process is heat. So power costs, and the ability to keep the facility cool are the two critical components of datacenter site selection. Those white states running through the map represent the lowest power costs.

While the cost to build a datacenter is staggering (~$2000 per square foot) the cost to operate it over time is daunting. Datacenters use a lot of electricity. Not just for powering the servers, but also to keep the environmental conditions correct for those servers. Computers don’t react well to dramatic changes in temperature and humidity, so a stable environment is critical. It takes as much, and often more power to maintain the datacenter environmental conditions as it does to power the servers. Locating the datacenter in a place with a naturally cool climate is a huge advantage due to the concept of “free cooling”… that is using naturally cool outside air to maintain the inside temps. We do this at digital.forest’s datacenter in Seattle. Outside air is used the majority of the time, year round. Only in daytimes during the summer do the mechanical cooling systems have to kick in and take over. You can’t do this in Houston, or even in most of California. So look at those white states and think about which ones have the reliably coolest climates.

Washington & Oregon.

Washington state has an advantage over Oregon in that power is less expensive here. Visionary companies started building datacenters near the large hydroelectric dams along the Columbia River about seven years ago. Microsoft and Yahoo near Quincy, VMware and T-mobile near Wenatchee. More were planned until our Attorney General, Rob McKenna declared that datacenters were not classified as “Manufacturing Facilities” and therefore not eligible for sales tax breaks on capital purchases tied to their construction. Given that it costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to build a datacenter, this action tipped the scales into Oregon’s favor. Even though the long term operating costs in Oregon may be slightly higher, the cost to build a facility is much, much lower as Oregon has no sales tax. This is likely why Facebook chose Oregon.

Construction will last for quite a while and inject $188 million dollars into the Oregon economy. Once in operation the facility will bring about 35 well-paying jobs (Facebook says 150% of the region’s prevailing wage) to the town of Prineville. For rural areas this can only be a good thing. So congrats to Facebook and Prineville, and let’s hope it is a long a fruitful relationship.

Datacenters are a growth industry of the future and will be a wonderful economic boost for rural communities east of the Cascades where traditional industries such as timber have all but vanished. I hope our politicians in Olympia have noted this and can get datacenter construction rolling again here in Washington.

Realization of an Anachronism: Raised Floor – Requiescat in Pace

This morning I noted, via Rich Miller’s twitter stream a new article counter-proclaiming the death of Raised Floor in datacenters. It boggles my mind how people still cling to this outdated, outmoded, and clearly obsolescent technology. I’ve ranted about this before two and a half years ago. Nothing has changed in those two and a half years other than raised floor being that much more obsolete.

Put your racks on slabs guys. It’s liberating.

Car Photo of the Day: The Bugatti in the Living Room

The Bugatti in the Living Room.

Inspired by the Bugatti Cententaire post on Phillipe Picavet’s blog today, especially the well-loved and smothered-in-patina pre-war Grand Prix Bug, I present the (in)famous “Bugatti in the Living Room” from Marrowstone Island, Washington. We visited the home of a noted car collector on Marrowstone as part of the 2008 Classic Motorcar Rally and he indeed does have a Bugatti parked in his living room. To say the least the man fits the term “eccentric” quite well. His home is literally built around his collection which includes many notable Jaguars and some amazing pre-war machinery.

Like the Bug that Phillipe presented, this one also can never be called “over-restored”. But unlike the car in Belgium, it does not get used as Ettore intended.

Car Photo of the Day: Red on Red

Red is one of those love/hate colors on cars. Often the red is applied much like lipstick on a pig, earning the epithet “Resale Red”.

Of course red is also the traditional color of Italian race cars, so it is (all too) often associated with exotica such as Ferrari. Proven here by the Testarossa in the background. I would much rather see Ferraris in other colors, and in fact the prettiest ones I have ever seen have always been something other than red. Of course the fact that despite a vast spectrum available, the vast majority of Ferraris ARE red makes choosing a beauty standing out among the sea of rosso corsa pretty easy.

If you’ll pardon the pun, my primary objection to red on cars is that the color is actually quite flat and rarely has any depth or subtlety. Compare two cars, one painted red, and the other say in a metallic maroon or silver, and the car will likely look SO much better in the latter colors. It is because of the primary color nature of flatness (shared with whites, non-glossy blacks, yellows, and blues) that makes for both the appeal, and the dislike of red on cars. To each his own I guess.