Crazy stair rails...

Our facilities group put in some new stairs leading to up to our lobby door. Here are the hand rails for those stairs. They seem kinda wacky!

64MB of Ram!!

I got a frantic call from one of our labs at work at 5:30 tonight. One of the critical lab instruments was locked, and noone had any idea of how to unlock it.

I arrived in the lab to find a nearly 10 year old computer, running NT 4.0, not connected to the network, just the instrument. As you can see, the orignal tech who installed this system, between discovering fire and dodging T-Rex, installed a whopping 64 MB of RAM.

Anywho -- thanks to my patron Saint, Petter Norhdal-Hagans (see my 500 day blog post about him) and his WONDERFUL freeware utility, I was able to get back up and running.

Keep the heck out...

Jack o' Lantern

The winner of a jack-o-lantern contest at work.

The Velcro Suit

We had our annual tent party at work today. Among the festivities was a velcro wall.

A velcro wall consists of a "bounce house" type surface ending in a padded, velcro loop covered wall. Each participant dresses up in a suit covered in velcro hook. You run and jump and throw yourself against the wall where you STICK

I like the colors and the smiles.

QA Bizz part 2 -- the winning flag...

So at the Bizz yesterday, each team was given the a piece of simple cloth with which to make a team flag (which is then judged for points towards the team title).

This was our team's flag.

As you can tell, we have some VERY creative and talented folks working with us.

Weird stuff happens on Fridays...

Today was our QA department's annual "Bizz". A "Bizz" is a weekly Friday afternoon get-together at work. Several of these bizzes are sponsored by individual departments, who go ALL OUT for them. Once a year, our quality (QA) department throws a massive bizz, and this year, the theme was "Indiana Jones".

The QA group is a pretty fun bunch, and they have games like "suck jello through a straw", "pin a whip on a picture of one the managers in the department", and this one -- wrapping a mummy with toilet paper. The rules: 3 members of each "team" congregate at the front. 2 of them are blindfolded, and they attempt to wrap the third, head to toe, in toilet paper, "mummy-style".

This is the team that one...

Geeks' wet dream...

24 nodes. Dual, dual core processors in each node. That's 96 cores of pure processing power. All joined in a beautiful Beowulf cluster.

Tim Allen would be SO grunting right now.

This thing was built to do some SERIOUS number crunching. A 10 hour process will now finish in 7 minutes or less.

How NOT to treat your laptop...

I got a call from one of our remote sales folks complaining that thier laptop was a piece of sh** and that they were being hampered in doing their work. They implied that our staff was incompetent because they had "sent it back 3 times already, to get viruses removed".

So, I told this person to send it to me, and I would replace it with a new one.

This is what they sent me. Note the COMPLETE lack of any kind of padding or packing. They literally shoved it into a fedex box and sent it along.

Ok, so I pulled it out of the box and opened it up. OMG ... This thing needed to be put in an autoclave before anyone touches it without gloves. There was crap spilled on the keyboard, and look at the dust on the computer. It's hideous! As I said in the e-mail to their manager (and my director, who forwarded it on to the VP of Sales), the joystick-mouse looked like something my cat coughed up. This is a $2000 laptop, less than 16 months old. NO WONDER THEY COULDN'T GET ANYTHING DONE, THEY COULDN'T SEE THE SCREEN FROM THE DIRT!!!

My first 2 hours of work today...

Before

After

Try, just try to guess what I do for a living...

Data infrastructure makes for a series of moments of controlled chaos. Bits go here, bits go there -- blue wires, black wires, yellow wires, orange fiber-optic cables.

Yet, in spite of all the confusion and spaghetti, it turns out that everthing goes where it is supposed to go -- all of the data that should be read is; all of the data that shouldn't be read isn't.