Gerald's Utah Trip..

We flew to Utah on Wednesday morning 6/8/00 and arrived at the data center. The equipment wasn't there yet so we made a lot of phone calls tracking it down. Looks like we'll get the stuff tomorrow.. Here's what the data center looks like on the outside..

It's Thursday/Friday 6/9/00 and I'm working.. We got the IBM 3494 tape library in so I took some shots of it.

left - front of the thing. this is where you put tapes in.
middle - front with the door open (before installed.. note the packaging). Holds 160 tapes, has two drives and a robotic arm. Each tape can hold up to 120GB of data compressed. uh ya it holds a lots of stuff.. heh
right - back of the thing.. yes it has it's own LCD screen and keyboard.

On Sunday 6/11/00, I went out to Park City (ski resort) and looked at the 2002 Olympic Park. Took some shots..

left - finish line of bobsled course (they come from the bottom of the pic)
midleft - top of bobsled course (right after starting line)
midright - far slot it the big bobsled start (where they run and push the sled)
right - starting spot for luge

left - looking at bobsled course from the bottom
mid - closeup of a section of the course just after the bridge (looking downhill)
right - closeup of tube where it croses the bridge (looking uphill)

left - panorama of ski jump practice area (big file)
mid - ski jump practice jumps (land in pool.. tubes under water make bubbles)
right - another view

On Monday 6/12/00 I went to snowbird and rode the tram up to the top of the hill. 11,000 feet altitude. It was about 55 degrees up there. Good view but not worth the $14 it cost to ride the tram :) The servers still haven't shown up yet but we've been on the phone a lot and it looks like it'll happen tomorrow.

left - pretty self explanatory.. this is the valley I came up from - i.e. the bottom of snowbird.
right - quick shot of the other tram heading down..

left - looking off towards salt lake city (bit to the left actually).. I was cold and it was windy :(
middle - looking down the backside of snowbird where they have a high speed quad.
right - looking towards SLC.. wind.. sun in my eyes.. uhg..

Ok on Tuesday the servers finally show up at 1pm.. We have until Wednesday to finish configuring them as our plane leaves at 10pm. Fortunately everything went smoothly and although there was more work to do, we  could do it remotely. We put in a lot of hours the last days.. Here are some shots of the servers..

left - the rack of two ibm h70 servers and a drawer of SSA disks before being unboxed.
middle - phillip on his laptop connected to the H70's doing some configuration. The top of the rack is two ibm h70's and at the bottom of the rack you can see the SSA disk drawer.
right - backside of the rack with the door open. We stored a bunch of boxes (manuals/extra stuff) inside.