Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng -- The Early Years

I mentioned in a post earlier this week that I grew up in a small town. I actually got emails about that! Apparently, my sophisticated, cosmopolitan mannerisms seem at odds with a small town background. While I admit to having adapted to big city life remarkably well, my small town past helped make me what I am today. Namely, a paranoid neurotic with a nearly painful physical addiction to every legal stimulant and a few marketed as "Herbal Energy Boosters" that slip (for now) under the radar of the FDA.

I grew up in Post, Texas, which had a population of less than 4,000. Post is named for its founder C.W. Post, who is known mostly today for Cocoa Pebbles. Back in the day, C.W. Post was a breakfast visionary. He invented Elijah's Manna (which was later renamed Post Toasties) and Grape Nuts, which were probably named between a couple of Mr. Post's frequent visits to the Sanitarium. Talked to him, the Grape Nuts did. They told him things. Things about the end times.

Before his apparent suicide in 1914, C.W. Post also invented a breakfast drink called Postum. It is a (shudder) caffeine-free "coffee alternative" even available today, though the ingredients are different. On store shelves today, Postum contains wheat and molasses, mostly, but the original formula was reported to contain these with the addition of cocaine and a couple of rain forest opiates -- All in the interest of eliminating caffeine. The marketing even featured a caffeine-fueled super villain with a jet pack:

"Mr. Coffee Nerves" was apparently (if these comics are to be believed) responsible for the complete destruction of many, many families.

Whatever Mr. Coffee Nerves was really about, C.W. Post founded what he envisioned a "Caffeine-free Utopia" in the West Texas desert. And that is where I grew up. In hindsight, I suppose that may explain a lot.

Please feel free to email me any and all questions about my various psychological issues. I'm comfortable enough answering just about anything thanks to the power of caffeine. Let's get better together, dear readers. Dr. Phil would be so proud.

Technorati Tags: coffee

Misunderstanding the Target Market

Gaze with wonder upon the glory that is the Dell 6950! Holding a ridiculous amount of processors and hosting an obscene amount of RAM, this information powerhouse is designed to serve the enterprise as the backbone of its server farm. Twin 1570 watt power supplies ensure constant uptime and four hot-swappable fans keep the temperature down in spite of an available AMD architecture and a face full of SATA drive slots.

The specification I tend to be most concerned with is, however, the base weight. 82lbs of awkwardly angled steel make up this beast. When coupled with the fact that it seems fated to slide into racks in which the bottom slots are already full, it is a nightmare to lever into place. It is so heavy, in fact, that once in place even DOA servers that never boot may just stay there forever -- LEDs forever dark in tribute to the monumental effort it took just to get it there.

Why, I ask, not aluminum? How about fiberglass or some type of heat-resistant plastic? Steel? Really? Steel lined with lead in case someone with X-Ray vision wants to hang out in the server room frantically jotting down a series of 1's and 0's to later decrypt into valuable data?

Dell, in designing this beast of a device, has failed to take into account the average upper body strength of members of the I.T. set. In so doing, they have made at least one (that I know of) curse their name in anger with profanity foul (and creative) enough to turn heads as far away as the break room.

And speaking of the break room . . . Last week we suffered a terrible loss. The brand-new CJ-2000 robotic coffee . . . making . . . automatic . . . pod-based . . . thing developed a leak in its heating tank, at once covering the countertop in hot water and filling half the floor with pore-opening steam. It did not recover.

We have not been notified what the plans are for the future. We do not know if the space it once occupied will ever be filled.

The repair tech did leave the rack of pods. Consequently I have learned that in desperate times a person can chew an espresso pod directly and forego the hassle of heating water altogether. Score one for "Team Efficiency".

Technorati Tags: coffee , Dell , I.T.

So, Monday, we meet again.
I don't think you have any idea, Bane of the Work Week, exactly with whom you are messing.
I slept last night. I didn't stay up playing World of Warcraft (which is my Sunday night tradition) in anticipation of the new expansion pack which will be released not even a full year from now. I must prepare for that event, but I knew today would require me to function at 80% efficiency, at a minimum, and that calls for sleep. And caffeine.
Today, I'm working on our web-filtering. As it stands now, every user mouse click is monitored -- until they make a secure connection. At that point, everything falls into the "Non-HTTP" bucket, so banking, secure check-out, and off-shore gambling sites with SSL login pages are all the same to us.
That has to change.
And if the software we have isn't doing it correctly by noon I have to find another software solution.
Good times.
Better times are to be had at the Up To Bat web comic. Not only has Belinda the snake taken on a much-deserved larger role in the story, I've been immortalized in in comic form as well.
While it is all in good fun, Andrew has actually given me a new idea for caffeine delivery which has me scouring Ebay and half a dozen quasi-reputable importers in an attempt to reproduce it IRL.