Alpharetta Wrap-Up

So the trip is over, and I made it home in one piece, though not fully without incident. On the morning of the 18th, we went to see where all the servers were housed, and it was actually really, really interesting just how much redundancy they build into places like this. They apparently haven't had the servers go 100% down since 1988 (I believe).

It works like this: there are power stations on both side of the two buildings that house these servers. One station feeds to one building and one feeds to the other, but in the event that a station goes down, the building who loses it will draw power from the other side. If they lose power altogether, there are huge batteries in the basements that will power the building for roughly 30 minutes until the main backup generators kick in. They will kick in in about 30-90 seconds, so 30 minutes is a lot of redundancy to begin with. There are thousands of gallons of diesel stored under these buildings, so these generators can run for a little over a week on generator power to allow time for the power to come back on. Pretty impressive, in my opinion.

I learned that with servers of this magnitude, the hard drives are not stored inside the machines, but they get their own rack. The servers link together for more power and speed and access the hard drives which can be individually removed and or replaced as needed, since there are multiple backups of everything. The floors that we walked on were not the base of the floor itself as vents pushed air up through the floor to cool these beasts and miles of cables also ran in the spaces under our feet.

The control center for these servers that show error messages and that sort of things looks like a NASA control room out of a space movie. Monitors are everywhere, and people just sit there and stare at them...waiting for something to happen.

Following the tour, we made our way to the airport, and got there is no time flat. This allowed plenty of time for us to wait in line at the ticket counter and then wait in line at the security check. I really have no qualms with the security thing. It doesn't annoy me or make me crazy. I don't find it invasive in the least, though they ended up sending both my carry on and personal item through twice because the machine "cut it off". Oh well.

The hop from Atlanta to Dallas was uneventful and almost early. It missed being early because the previous flight was leaving late. Hm... This was a harbinger of what was to come. Our flight to Tulsa was supposed to leave at 5:20 which would put us in at 6:24. That didn't happen. We checked the time and it was delayed thirty minutes. So we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And finally around 6:00, we started...BOARDING. That flight had left late from wherever it had come from so it was late getting in and once we were on board, we sort of figured out why. You see, I was coordinating with the Queen on when I was getting there so she could pick me up and we could do our weekly dinner with my parents and siblings. Well, as we were waiting on the plane even longer, we hear this little (paraphrased) announcement: "Ladies and genetlemen, sorry about the delay this evening. We're having a little problem with a liner in the rear baggage compartment, and it's giving us some trouble in shutting the door. We're moving some things around and got it closed, but our center of gravity is off, so we're not going to be able to take off until we get our numbers lined up. We'll let you know as soon as we have it taken care of so we can take off." Or something like that.

Anyway, about 6:25 or so, we finally backed out of the gate and took off. The flight was uneventful and smooth from there, and I think I spotted the Red River (the border between Texas and Oklahoma) from the plane's window. That was neat.

So I got back without any major problems and only one delay, and did see the family that evening. Not sure if I'll participate in the group that took me to Georgia the last couple years again, because it always causes considerable consternation among the Queen and Princesses. I've found that I can be a bit of a homebody after a time, and don't like to go that far away. The time in Alpharetta was ok. The fitness center had a good treadmill that I couldn't break and I ran every night, but that hardly substitutes for home.

It is good to be back.

Complete iPod Randomness

So I'm not home yet, but this was just an observation as I listen to my iPod through the computer. I was going through the list of songs I hadn't heard yete since around April 9th, and sorted it by length to see the longest one. The longest song was called "Better Man" by Oasis and has a run time of 38:03.

I thought to myself, "there's no way an Oasis song is 38 minutes long." I mean, Oasis is cool, but they don't do long songs. Their max is usually around 5 minutes, so I suspected a "hidden track." Now, these hidden tracks worked ok when we were doing CDs and it was the last track and we forgot to stop the disc when it was done. But now we're in digital content, and while we can sometimes forget about it playing, I rarely play albums in song order. Not only that, but my iPod can literally go for weeks non-stop, so hitting a sudden 30 minutes of total silence between the two songs on this 38 minute track only makes me momentarily wonder if there's something wrong with my iPod. It's just not cute or cool anymore.

Now, I'll have to go home, extract this one song, load into my MP3 mixer, cut it into two songs, and figure out what that instrumental thing they did is supposed to be called, other than "Untitled Track." Or I might just tell the iPod to stop playing the track after the 3 minute song that was at the top of the track. Who knows? I will probably forget about it by tomorrow anyway till it crops up again.

Oasis isn't the only one that did this to me. Third Day plugged an actual song at the end of a long track that's mostly silence, and at the end of "Be", Pain of Salvation pulled an 11 second "joke" at the end of a 5 minute track where the opening part of the track is all of 30 seconds long, if that.

Oh well, such is life in the digital age.. You just can't appreciate the gags of yesteryear.

Alpharetta Day 3

At the end of the third day here, it becomes considerably less interesting. More classified conversations in which we endeavor to solve the problems of the company as reflected on the yearly employee surveys, and while there were some humorous comments, I don't remember any of them because there was just so much chatter throughout the day. It starts to drone out as the day goes on so that when it's all over, all you remember is a dial tone.

Lunch wasn't quite as cool today as it was yesterday. I don't think I mentioned before that yesterday, we had barbecue beef and/or chicken along with mac and cheese and pudding with nilla wafers. Talk about a dream lunch. Today was quite the opposite. We had beef and chicken along with something masquerading as a "salsa" which people refer to as a "corn salsa." This was corn tomatoes, onions, cilatro, etc. If we look up "salsa" in a Spanish-English dictionary, we find the definition is "sauce." I can guarantee you that this quasi-salad was in no way "sauce." I had some beef, some chicken, and a couple cookies. Yummy lunch.

For dinner, we went to the Cracker Barrel. A lot of people thouht it was silly for one of us wanting to go to the Cracker Barrel when they're all over the country, but one person had a preference, and the rest of us didn't care. However, it was quite good. I'd forgotten that Cracker Barrel had some really tasty biscuits. Our destination, however, brought up a funny story from one of our people (it was just the Tulsa people that went there).

Apparently, there was a program that was a code cracker of some sort, and as it was an internal program, someone just called it a cracker. Well, some member of upper management got ahold of this program and had a fit over the name indicating that the name was derogatory. Points to you if you know why someone would think "cracker" would be derogatory. Being a language guy, of course, I knew that one of the five or six definitions of cracker is derogatory.

Naturally, we all understood that a cracker in programming is something that break a code of some kind. A cracker is also one that can open a safe without knowing the combination - they're called safe crackers. There was even a Price Is Right game called Safe Cracker. A cracker is also a crispy, baked, yeast-free, bread product. A crack is a break in something, and by English rules, a "cracker" would be one that causes such a break.

But no, this person threw a fit because "cracker" is also a derogatory term for white people primarily used by the African American populace. What was sadder than this is that most of the other managers had no idea what she was throwing a fit about, and the derogatory form of the word had to be defined for them. It was just a name for a program used internally, so no one really cared in the end what they decided to call it, so they changed the name to appease this person, but really, it was a silly deference to a word.

The Queen and Princesses went swimming today, and I understand they had a lot of fun. Even Sassy Pants opened up and played freely in the pool at the Queen's grandparents' house. I got t talk to them earlier, and everyone sounded good.

Tonight is my last night in Alpharetta, and I'm looking forward to heading home. I did hit the fitness room for an hour tonight, and this time, I kept my heart rate down to a reasonable level (between 130 and 150) by doing a combination of running and walking. After all, I'm only trying to stay fit and burn the fat a bit so I stay healthy. I'm not training for the Olympics. No need to push myself to the breaking point trying to run 6mph for an hour. No, I was at 4 - 4.5 most of the time, which some 10 minute bursts to 5 and 6 here and there. It was nice.

Tomorrow, we wrap things up here and tour our data center which is in this area. We have a server that we call "the Atlanta server," and we et to see where that is housed. It'll be cool. The next time I write something on here, I'll probably be home.