The ramblings of Steve-0Posts RSS Comments RSS
Been busy lately, and here’s something to up that threshold a bit. Our realtor gave us a call the other day, she found a good deal on a place that just fell out of escrow. We’re looking at it, and trying to figure out what our options are (taxes, finances, etc). So nothing’s for sure, but just wanted to share.
Details - 4BR, 2.5BA, 2 car garage, big yard, nice floors, etc. 
Well, time for my first nerdy posting.
I work in the Engineering Computing group for a semiconductor company, as a Unix Sysadmin / App Developer / Metalworker / Manual Laborer / whatever the job requires. Our group, consisting of 6 people, supports our worldwide engineering computing infrastructure for 15 sites worldwide.
We just acquired a company in India, and on Tuesday, we were tasked with putting together a complete datacenter and shipping by Friday! Well, fortunately we made it (with absolutely no time to spare) and now its (hopefully) on a plane to India.
Take a look at the pictures below, this would be every nerd’s dream (and it also doubles as a heater!). It has 10 dual-Opteron’s with 8GB memory, 6 UltraSparcIII services boxes, and 6 dual-Xeon 4GB ram systems. Of course, there’s the standard out-of-band management, network switch, manged power supplies, and cabling. When we get them in, we’ll be sending out another rack, equipped with a 48 port gigabit ethernet switch, NetApp filer with 2 TeraByte capacity, cisco router, and a couple more compute servers. All the people in India have to do is plugin a network cable, a couple power cables, and they’ll be up and running.
It was quite a project, but the most challenging was getting this thing out of our building. The complete assembly weighs a good 1000+ lbs, and we had to get this 8ft moster into our elevator, which as a 7ft door opening. We had to tilt the thing and wheel it in (and out), without crushing ourselves and/or losing $200k of equipment. Needless to say, I didn’t need to hit the gym today. Who says a bunch of nerds can’t hold their own in on the physical side of things!
Every year around the holidays, the question comes up - what are we doing for new years?! Well, we didn’t have an answer until a couple days before. A bunch of our friends had booked hotel rooms in Vegas, and offered up their extra floor space, so we decided to go. We left New Years Eve, in the morning, and made good time.
New years in Vegas is pretty crazy - I don’t know how many people were there, but definitely more than I’ve ever seen. Mostly, we just walked around the strip (beer in hand, of course), with the occassional visit to the bar for a refill. We had a fun time, and the fireworks were cool.
After midnight wasn’t so fun… we were stuck in a stampede for about 25 minutes after the fireworks, and kept busy trying not to get in fights with cholos, cholas, and other various ‘badasses’. We finally made it to a casino, but we don’t gamble or smoke, and weren’t really up for any heavy drinking. We decided to just pack up, and headed home at 2:30AM. After and hour and 10 minutes to get to the I15 from our hotel, we made it home right around sunrise.
Its nice to say we’ve been to Vegas for new years, but I wouldn’t go again, nor recommend it. Go to Embarcadero in San Francisco, that’s a fun place to party with 300,000 other people - and at least they’re somewhat friendly (see entry for Jan 1, 2001 
).
The Beautiful wife and I
Ever seen the strip like this?
