Life and Times of an Infrastructure Architect

After 4 years of diligent blogging, I've decided it's time to close my livejournal account. All posts have been removed, and will not be returning. It's been real.

It was a gray day and I was pretty restless.

Mike took me to a Juno Reactor show last week.. The music was .. painful, as was all the pot smoke. However, the lighting was absolutely fantastic.

When I moved away from San Francisco, I was miserable and Jennifer was hoping I would love Seattle. I hated Seattle which made Jennifer sad that I didn't seem to love either San Francisco or Seattle.

One day Jennifer told me "OK, you need to choose. You can hate Seattle, or San Francisco; just not both of them." I choose to give my heart to San Francisco"

Jennifer made me this pie last week to celebrate.

I left the Digg thing early last night, just wasn't feeling it. Hopped on the Daly City train and road it to 24th, then took the 49 to 30th with the intention of waiting for the 24 to go up Cortland, my back was spasming too bad to enjoy the idea of walking up Bernal last night.

While I stood in front of Los Panchos (salvadorean restaurant for the GODS), I noticed the Knockout sadly staring back at me. It was sad that I no longer go there because it isn't the Odeon. It begged and pleaded with me, then eventually lured me in with the thought of a happy hour.

Since I'm the kind of guy who goes all in or not at all, I sad down and got a double Macallan and a Guinness. When I realized how sexy the happy hour was, I ordered a second double Macallan and another Guinness before starting on the first.

For the next hour I talked to some guy from LindenLabs about monetization schemes for virtual worlds, and flirted with this cute woman sitting next to him. Then Josh showed up at my request, and I focused on helping him catch up to me. I gave the LL guy my card, as well as the cute girl with the sexy lips and the Lucas Haas eyes. Surprisingly, she gave me her card back and wrote her cell phone on it while giving me a head. I kissed her neck gently, then turned back to Josh.

By the time Josh had caught up, I'd leaped ahead in the race, and we went over to our beloved Taqueria Cancun for the 2nd best Carne Asada Burritos in the city. Two gorgeous women walked in wearing flowery rockabilly dresses, so I lecherously took pictures of them as they waited for their food. They were not amused, neither was I. The pictures all came out blurry.

Back to the Knockout to try and get the bartender drunk, and find our limits. Josh kept buying me drinks while trying to kill my liver. Sometime around 11pm I found my limit and we made our departure. Damage estimate: 15 drinks. Took a cab up to the Bernal house, and went inside with plans to fall asleeep.

Instead I ordered some pizza, pet the cat for 2 hours, had a 2 hour cal with Brenna followed by an hour and a half call with the girl from the bar.. The girl from the bar said something along the lines of,

"I'm surprised you're alive. You were ... Very destructive. I was impressed by the quantity of and rate at which you attacked the liquor supply."

To which I responded, "Yeah. It was just one of those Nihilistic nights. But don't worry, I'm fat and Irish. My liver has a tremendously high amount of fortitude."

Just an interruption to our regularly scheduled programming to let you know about my mightyness.

I believe this was the night we threw a wake for the guitar player from the eddie haskells. Selena on the left, Nicole on the right. Circa 2003. I can't believe it's been over five years since this was taken.

I went out with an incredible woman last night. She was 57 flavors of hotness. Outgoing, bubbly, a party girl, great skin. She wore this incredible fucking dress last night. 5'3, 120lbs, beautifully curvy. Way, wayyyyyyyy too fucking hot for me. And the woman was mine for the taking.. Then I kind of drunkenly walked away from the group we were with. Not sure why.

walkin a path of self destruction
not affected by the repercussions
nihilism ... nihilism ...
i was so full of scotch i could not stand up
i was hittin the shots and i moved to a cup

I have 29 days to return them.. Something about them doesn't feel right but maybe it's just because I was so used to my old specs.

What do you think?

It's weird that Im still teling people that Linda and I aren't together. Lately this conversation seems to pop up every few days:

Them: "It's so good to see you! So you moved Linda and Kaylee back?"
Me: "Uhm, no. Linda and Kaylee live with Linda's parents in a scary suburb of Seattle. I'm now homeless in San Francisco"
Them: "Oh. I'm so sorry"
Me: "I'm not. Can I crash on your couch?"


OK, so I don't really ask them to crash on their couch, but it would make the conversation funnier.

I'm about to head up to the outer richmond to visit my favorite coffee shop. I have an overwhelming need to see the wonderful woman who used to bring us up coffee and snacks in the days leading up to and after Kaylee was born. She's going to be so sad to hear the news, I don't want to tell her. I remember her leaning her head against my chest and crying as she watched me pack up the last bits of detritus when we moved out in March of 2007.

Anyone sick enough to read my livejournal with any regularity knows that I'm a man whore. The nice thing about being a slut is I don't owe anything to anybody. The mutual agreement with the woman I sleep with is it's just for the moment, maybe on other instances, but no ownership is even imagined..

Well, apparently I wasn't as good about this unspoken communication as I had hoped. Two women are now pissed off that I'm not coming back to Seattle. One of them is pissed off I didn't tell her I was leaving.. What part of "One Night Stand" did they not understand?


Oddly enough, my inbox today was the first thing to make me smile in weeks.

Resilience is one of my favorite bands. They saved my life one fucked up night five years ago.

Unity by Resilience

My friends are my family
That's the way it always will be
My friends are my family
If you're fucking with them you're fucking with me.

My friends are my family
That's the way it always will be
We believe in solidarity
When you're fucking with them you're fucking with me

U-N-I-T-Y
U-N-I-T-Y
U-N-I-T-Y
Unity


There's a bond between my friends and me
That's something that you can not see
Something at the core of you and me
We believe in unity

U-N-I-T-Y
U-N-I-T-Y
U-N-I-T-Y
Unity

It sounds ridiculously dramatic, but for those of you who know me; you know it's not. I hate drama, and try to avoid it like the plague. I'm certainly not immune, however.

When we moved to Seattle, my life fell apart. Because of the situation, all of the moving work was mine and mine alone to do. Dirk and Josh were fucking rock stars, and they helped out tremendously. I took Josh out for lunch to say goodbye, and he tagged along with us to go pickup the car dolly from Budget Rent A Car.


Budget's troglodyte scratched his chin and said the truck was overloaded with books... It probably was, Linda used to buy books on Amazon as a way to feed her depression.. Hundreds of books. Because of the weight, they decided it would be dangerous to pull a car over the mountains. I started trying to figure out what I would do with this SUV filled with all of our "will need immediately" belongings, as the rental truck was packed by a truck-packing master, Dirk, with not a square inch to spare.

Obviously Linda wasn't able to be there physically due to the pregnancy and birth. The hard part, was that Linda just wasn't there. I guess what I'm saying is a month or two before Kaylee was born, Linda ceased being my wife and just became the wonderful but distant woman who was bearing my beloved daughter.

Moving to Seattle was hard, it hurt emotionally and physically. We'd just spent three weeks up here building out our datacenter (Dirk, Josh, and myself). Then I flew back with about 10 days to spare before Kaylee was born. We spent a month in San Francisco packing, stressing, and trying to get everything together.

There was a point on the way to Seattle where I almost just gave up. I called Linda to give her a progress report and to ask her how her one job, the housing search, was coming. She hadn't even looked at anything online. She didn't need to I realize now, she was where she wanted to be. Comfortable and home with her parents in the suburbs.

During that phonecall, I almost just left. I realized I could just leave the truck with the belongings, and let Linda know where they were. Her father would have driven down, picked up the truck, and bailed his daughter out. Maybe I should have. I didn't care about any of the material assets. The only thing that stopped me was my daughter who I love more than anything in the world.

I lied to myself and said that it was just the stress. That I was in a lot of physical pain from the move, and exhausted from the packing and ordeal of becoming a father. It's going to get better. You'll find a home to live in with your family, and life is just going to be peachy. It'll be like they're talking about you on Live From Lake Woebegone.

Seattle never got better. In fact, it got worse. Driving into this shitty Snohomish suburb, I hit a patch of ice, and almost crashed the truck. I got into Linda's house at midnight, tried to look at my daughter who I hadn't seen in three days, and my ex-wife scowled at me telling me to shut up and go to bed. That sort of set the stage for the past 18 months of my life.

We stayed in Snohomish for 2-3 weeks. All of the houses available for rent sucked. Linda insisted on a house with a yard because she thought she was going to garden. She just wanted to make my life hell. I wanted a nice downtown apartment where we could walk to everything. Well, we moved into an $1,800/month 2,200 square ft house in Greenlake. We would have been happier in a 720 square ft apartment in Belltown for $1,000/month , as I'm realizing now.

Fast forward a year and a half. I'm getting divorced, and spending all of my time either traveling for business, or couch-surfing in San Francisco, reconnecting from old friends. I realize that the previous three years of living in virtual isolation with my introverted ex-wife had taken it's toll on me. I yearned for adult, intelligent, compassionate conversation and companionship.

When I was on a business trip, or in San Francisco seeing friends, life was good. I had people to talk to, interact with, and just enjoy life with. Whenever I got back to Seattle, a wave of depression and suicidal urges washed over me. Seattle, as illogical as it sounds, has been trained in a sort of pavlovian way as pure isolated misery.

Every time I step off the plane in Seatac, it's over. I'm alone, and I want to die. That's the headspace I'm in until I get on the plane and fly away, then it's just gone and I'm a human being again.

The past two weeks have been rough. The roughest of my life. I'm getting out of Seattle alive, but by the skin of my teeth. I almost didn't make it.

Now I'm a slut. You know this, I know this, most of the ~80 women I've slept with know this. I'm not ashamed or what I do or why I do it. I love contact and interaction with people in general, I need it. But, there's more. I love women. The touch, the scents, the tension, the interaction. Plus I'm good at it.

In the past 8 or 9 days there have been a lot of women. I needed them to help me feel semi human until I could leave this town. In the past 4 days, there have been 5 women, one of them has stayed over twice and she's fucking awesome. It's not all kink, just most of it.

Through some combination of skill, knowing how to listen, and being a halfway likeable kind of guy, lots of women seem to enjoy my presence. I find this a real honor that so many women have been not only willing, but excited to share some intimate part of theirselves with me. I look forward to the next 80 with glee. Every one of them will mean something slightly different to me, and will all be remembered. The kinksters, the quickies, the co-dependent fucked up situations, and the caring, affectionate, non-judgemental ones who keep me out of dark places, they're all amazing human beings in their own special way.

The woman last night had stayed a night before as I mentioned, and she's great. It was supposed to be this complex scene, but I realized there was no way I could get into the headspace and I called it off with intentions of moping around and feeling miserable instead. She was empathetic enough to sense something was wrong, and came over anyways with some food and beverages to my surprise. We talked for a few hours, then made soft, affectionate love until 4am. In the morning we held each other for a couple of hours until she had to go to work, and she promised me that everything was going to get better.



Dear Seattle,

Fuck you.

Dear women,

Thank you.

I took this yesterday on the way to lunch with Linda and Daniel. The benefit of having a laptop/camera backpack is I'm always ready for those perfect moments. Linda and Daniel were annoyed that I told them to go ahead, but I couldn't resist taking this shot.

I did a tiny bit of post-processing on this. Specifically I enhanced the blue channel by about 10% and fixed the white balance.

Taken from the rooftop garden in my Belltown Apartment Building. The white building in the background is a big Seattle datacenter hub, Fisher Plaza.

Thursday, August 7th is my 29th birthday. You should come eat and drink with us!

The details are here.

"honestly I believe Google is a true evil empire".-- Serguei Beloussov

I just had a great talk with Serguei Beloussov from Parallels. He had some interesting things to say about Parallels, as well as Google's effect on the hosting industry. Click here to read the full interview.

Reposted from DatacenterJunkie:


I've been in Chicago for exactly 9.5 hours, and HostingCon is already better than I had hoped for. I landed at 2:30PM, and was checked into my hotel by 3:30. Daniel, BitPusher's CEO arrived at about 7:15. We mostly relaxed until 8:30, enjoying room service and the view, the we headed out to an informal get together at the W.

We met up with some of the guys from MessageWire, and DedicatedNOW in the lobby, and spend some time with the owner of FortressITX. Once we realized that drinks were on SoftLayer, we chatted up their CEO Lance Crosby, and spent a couple of hours enjoying Macallan, and talking about SoftLayer's rapid ascent. I'm going to meet up with Lance later on during the conference to do a quick interview about where he started, where they are today, and where they're going.

This is shaping up to be the most exciting conference of 2008. We decided to call it an early night to save our livers and actually make it to the conference on time.
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I just posted my photos from the expo hall on DatacenterJunkie