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.

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 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?

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

Since I don’t really cover software here, I had to cherry pick the sessions I’ll be going to this week. I only expect to make about half of the sessions that on my personal schedule. The rest of the time I hope to be doing interviews and milling about the hallway track.

Here’s my OSCON schedule if you’d like to have a chat.

A silly hobby of mine has been trying to decipher the lyrics of unpublished, live recordings .. The one I've struggled with for .. Err, a decade, is "Face That Screams" by Operation Ivy. The recording is a pretty bad live recording, and it was never recorded in the studio. I've even asked Jesse Michaels, and he helped me make some headway with the chorus, but he doesn't remember the lyrics..

Anyways, here's my best stab at "Face That Screams" by Operation Ivy. I've italicized the bits I'm unsure of.

Left the city warehouse
Took it eastbound for the bay
Sky's overcast, building up in shades of gray

Two women got on and sat down on the side
waited for the end of the raid

Enter these two guys I knew they'd sit down in the back
to them the way one of the women looked provoked his wrath
they spat venomous insults so satisfied and loud
in this vicious, aggressiveness growl

have you ever seen lips that sing on a face that screams?
have you ever seen lips that sing on a face that screams?

then one of the women started screaming out this song
whose lyrics fell with Johnny whose life had gone wrong
she kept singing louder, and ignoring the attack
explaining that johnny was on smack

harassment continued her song persevered
passengers looked back in curiosity and fear
every so often in the middle of a line
she's saying mister, I ain't no bitch

have you ever seen lips that sing on a face that screams?
have you ever seen lips that sing on a face that screams?

their power was so cheap
her strength was so clear

The Subject really kind of says it all ..



I dont want no war going down tonight
Civilization ha I call it as I see it
I call it bullshit you know I still cannot believe it
Our evolution now has gone the way of hate
A world evolved resolved in this stupid fate
Stop this war
All so different yeah I say were all the same
All caught you know in the division game
Self destruction fast impending like a bullet
No one can stop it once its fired no one can control it
Stop this war
A final word, wait it's not a call to action
We aint no sect we aint no fucking faction
Unity unity youve heard it all before
This time its not exclusive we want to stop a war
Unity as one stand together
Unity evolutions gonna come
Operation Ivy Unity

I'm driving down to Portland this weekend to spend the week there for OSCON. Anybody have any recommendations for fun?

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