Earlier this week, representatives from Portland General Electric (PGE) and Energy Trust of Oregon were generous enough to attend an EasyStreet Green Team meeting and give interested employees an overview of Electric Vehicles, including the various models available and the various ways in which they can be charged. To sweeten the story, PGE brought along their Nissan Leaf and plugged it into EasyStreet’s EV charging station for all to see.
IT people generally can’t stand the unnecessary programs that consume valuable space on brand new PCs and have unceremoniously dubbed it “crapware.” Some of IT’s more decorous types have tried to come up with a more genteel term.
Last week the TechRepublic.com blog polled its IT readership on the issue, presenting a list of about a dozen alternatives to “crapware.”
There have been more than 2,000 responses to date, with “bloatware” favored by 15 percent and “junkware” preferred by 12 percent. All other suggestions – such as “wasteware” or “spamware” or “uselessware” – got negligible support.
The most popular poll response – leaving all others in the dust at 48 percent – was (you guessed it), “Thanks, but I’ll stick with crapware.”
Rather than in May, we have our Bike-to-Work Day when the weather is better.
Today, out of 34 employees, we had 13 bike to work! We hosted a custom-made omelet or blueberry pancake breakfast (made by one of the riders who got here at 5:30am for prep). Here’s the documentary photo!
Left-to-right: Brent Holder, Travis Ogdon, Susan Douglas-Fox, Kathy Zak (chef), Sarah Wetmore (first timer), Lorraine Bessmer, Rich Bader (CEO), Jeff Burlingame, John Beaston, Mikayla Dickinson (first timer), Steve Knipple, Jack Flug and Eric Bourassa.
It’s interesting how barnyard animals have been written up in conjunction with data centers lately – embracing the “farm” in “server farm.”
Ten thousand cows, for example, and the resulting bi-product of their collective digestive systems, “could fulfill the power requirements of a 1-megawatt (MW) data center — the equivalent of a medium-sized data center — with power left over to support other needs on the farm.” This observation is from HP Labs in a research paper presented at the recent ASME International Conference on Energy and Sustainability.
Apparently, the heat generated by said data center can aid the anaerobic digestion of animal waste, which results in the production of methane that can be used to generate power for the data center. “This symbiotic relationship allows the waste problems faced by dairy farms and the energy demands of the modern data center to be addressed in a sustainable manner,” says HP. (I’m just hoping you don’t end up with a server farm that smells like a dairy farm.) Click here to read more about this dairy/server farm scenario.
Goats are the topic at the Yahoo! data center in Quincy, Washington. Twice a year a herd of 252 goats takes care of the invasive weeds (probably blackberries) that threaten to take over the pasture beside the facility. (Nothing was mentioned in this article about the resulting bi-product of their collective digestive systems.)
With a moo, moo here… a baa, baa there…
Brian Ghidinelli uses a stack of old Linux servers as an end table.
I’ve never watched it, but there’s a show on A&E called “Hoarders” about the lives of individuals whose inability to part with to part with their belongings (read, “garbage”) is “so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis.”
This ITWorld article takes a peak at folks who are unable to part with their antiquated technical “stuff.”
One fellow mentioned in the article, an IT lawyer, defends his obsession with keeping old laptop computers “because they contain old electronic business records.” Uh huh. Most of the other hoarders confess to holding on to their ancient hardware “just in case…” Sounds geek to me.
At EasyStreet we don’t hoard old, worthless electronics, but we do have an assortment of — let’s say — “seasoned” servers available for lease by Managed Server customers whose applications don’t require the latest/greatest equipment. Give us a call if you’d like to find out more.
It’s time to knock wood. EasyStreet didn’t have an outage in 2009. And with all of our redundancies in place, we’re not likely to have one. (But I write this with 14 days left in the year — hence the “knock wood.”) This Data Center Knowledge roundup of major data center outages makes it clear it can happen to any organization — and for a variety of reasons. Even Michael Jackson “broke” the Interwebs. Enjoy!
People who don’t understand computers often see them as tools of voodoo, capable of magical — and sometimes cursed — behavior. Longtime IT veteran Jaime Henriquez, who holds a doctorate in technology and culture, recently compiled a list of common computer “superstitions” for TechRepublic.com.
“These are the users who have memorized the formula for getting the computer to do what they want but have no clue how it works,” he explains. “As in magic, as long as you get the incantation exactly right, the result ‘just happens.’ The unforgiving nature of computer commands tends to feed this belief.”
For example, refusing to reboot is a major superstition. “Some users seem to regard a computer that’s up and running and doing what they want as a sort of miracle, achieved against all odds, and unlikely ever to be repeated — certainly not by them,” he writes. “Reboot? Not on your life!”
Another example is believing the computer has a personality. “This is the user who claims in all honesty, ‘The computer hates me,’ and will give you a long list of experiences supporting their conclusion,” Henriquez says.
Or believing the computer is all-knowing. “Things this user says betray the belief that behind all the hardware and software there is a single Giant Brain that sees all and knows all — or should,” he writes. “They’re surprised when things they’ve done don’t seem to ‘stick,’ as in ‘I changed my email address; why does it keep using my old one?’”
“Once on the path to magical thinking,” he continues, “some users give up trying to understand the computer as a tool to work with and instead treat it like some powerful but incomprehensible entity that must be negotiated with. For them, the computer works in mysterious ways, and superstitions begin to have more to do with what the computer is than how they use it.”
Are you in your mid-thirties, chubby and, well, depressed? Some recent research would say you must play video games. Lots of them.
Actually, countless gamers are fuming over a study of nearly 600 adults age 19 to 90 in the Seattle-Tacoma area that concluded the average gamer is 35, has a body mass index (BMI) pegging him or her as obese and tends to take more mental-health days than non-gamers.
Gamers predictably are questioning the cause-and-effect conclusions of the study, which was compiled by researchers from the federal Center for Disease Control, Emory University and Andrews University.
Dr. James Weaver III of the CDC says the findings “appear consistent with earlier research on adolescents that linked video game playing to a sedentary lifestyle and overweight status and mental health concerns.”
“Habitual use of video games as a coping response may provide a genesis for obsessive-compulsive video-game playing, if not video-game addiction,” he says.
Typical of the gamers’ response is a comment on Newsvine from one Heather Hull. “I know plenty of people in their 30s, overweight and depressed, and they don’t play video games,” she wrote. “I also know plenty of people who play and are thin, happy, and outgoing. Being a video gamer does not mean you are a slob, lazy, or stupid! Perpetuating a poor stereotype? For shame.”
The Seattle-Tacoma area was chosen for the study, researchers said, both because of its size as the 13th largest media market in the United States and because its Internet usage level is “the highest in the nation.”
They blogged so we’ll brag — the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA) has recognized EasyStreet for becoming the first and only “official” Bike Friendly Business in Beaverton. (We recently earned a bronze award from the League of American Bicyclists.)
To read the entire interview with EasyStreet’s VP of Customer Services, John Beaston, go to this post by Margaux at the BTA blog.
