Well, here I am for my first full day in Colorado Springs. From my office, I can see the Air Force academy stadium, and light planes are constantly taking off & landing for glider training for our next generation of budding pilots.
However, my particular view of this expansive city is mostly this:
Yep, sitting in my cube farm, working on a laptop as usual. One is very much like another, as far as that goes. On the plus side, I picked up a copy of Gary Taubes’ latest book and began reading it over dinner last night.
One thing that both surprised and disgusted me was how brown the snow was when flying in. From what I understand, this is part of the system that ends up cleaning the air coming in from California. The smog hits the Rocky Mountains and drops it in the high valleys. Thus Colorado is part of California’s smog-cleaning system.
When I was picking up Taubes’ book last night, I happened to show up at Barnes & Noble right as a choir was gearing up to put on a performance! They were pretty darn good, looked great, and had a lot of energy.
(Postscript: sorry for the sideways pictures. I lack the time to get them rotated and re-uploaded today!)
Hey Matt!
So, does your suite have a kitchen? Where have you been so far? How do you like ( insert generic datacenter name containing RMDC here ) ?
Answers
1. Yes, my suite has a kitchen. It’s just two burners, but that’s really enough. Tonight, I’ll sautee strip steak with shrimp, onions, mushrooms, green peppers, and garlic in a white wine sauce with a hint of soy the way I like it. Yeah, I spent a $75 trip to the grocery store last night. I’m already sick of eating out every meal!
2. I have been to the data center — all floors that UltraMegaCorp owns — and downtown. Haven’t checked out the Air Force Academy or any of the nearby sightseeing stuff. I think I’m going to go for a hike at one of the local tourist traps tomorrow, when it’s pleasant, and maybe go boarding up in the mountains with Bieb Sunday.
3. The DC is small. I think we could fit three of them into my home data center. I also really don’t like the lack of a hot-row/cold-row setup. They must be spending way more cooling the place than they need to when systems are sucking in the hot air from the boxes in front of them. The lack of row-end patch panels means that, initially, their network & fibre-channel switch row looks HUGE HUGE HUGE… until you realize that all the stuff we do via a cabinet or two on the end of a row, they centralize into one long aisle of networking gear. Nice to see an old Sun backup unit for their DLTs… and it also does LTO! I haven’t seen that type of tape library since 2001. Their guard almost took me down for following my co-worker into the DC, and called for approval for me to be there when I didn’t buzz myself in.
Stuff they do that’s cool or better here:
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Matthew P. Barnson