Here I am hand-writing this entry on a pad of paper. Why am I hand-writing this? Well, I'm surrounded by a mass of communications equipment, but no way of easily "jacking in" to write this entry. I'm in Margaretville (NY), a small town nestled in the heart of the Catskills. Sitting in a tiny little building, situated on top of a very steep hill (which I just had to walk up), fixing a server for a client of mine in a pseudo-co location facility.
The juxtaposition is amazing. Outside (where I am right now), I'm surrounded by forested hills, gorgeous scenery - the trees just look fantastic in all their different shades, hardly a house in sight. (A couple of massive satellite dishes are just over behind me, but I can't see them from this vantage point.) Inside this building is the very heart of a modern cable system - racks and racks of satellite receivers, servers, boxes, etc. (I'm a geek, but I can't identify half of what this stuff does, honestly) - a quarter million dollars worth of hardware, as their tech told me. Very neat stuff, and I'm here alone too - the tech guy who let me in went back to the administrative office 5 miles away.
The sensation of being alone in the middle of nowhere with nature, and yet knowing that just 3 steps away through a door is a mass of advanced communications equipment, servicing 5000+ people is such a strange (but neat) one, that I'm really at a loss to describe it.
No point to this entry beyond sharing a "hey this is cool" feeling. I'll have to type this in when I get back home tonight. All I can say is that I wished I carried a camera with me.
Hand-written at approx. 2pm today while a RAID array rebuilt itself. Typed in verbatim from the pad I wrote it on.
Posted by Mark at May 13, 2003 07:24 PM | TrackBack