Diary of a Network Geek

Wow, I almost forgot to post this week!

It’s funny, but I skip just a couple of times and all of a sudden I’m out of the habit of posting a Friday Fun Link.  Well, hopefully, I’ll get back into the rhythm of regular posting again, one step at a time.  Since getting married, I’ve decided I need to start doing more things like that, which I used to do when I first met my wife and we started dating.  Like…
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Where was this when I needed it?!

If you don’t work in the IT industry, you may think of us all as the stereotypical “pencil-necked geeks”, but you’d be wrong.  That’s especially true of those of us who have had the pleasure of doing regular work in large data centers or server farms.  When you see those long racks of endless servers in ads on TV, consider this, someone had to lift them all into place.  And, if you think that laptop you have to lug through airport security is heavy, then you never, ever want to have to lift a server into place in a server rack.  Consider this; a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server, which is a pretty standard or average size, weighs almost 60 pounds.  When you have to lift that into a server rack, you have to hold it steady while lining up the sliding rail assemblies so that they lock into place in that server rack.  Now, imagine controlling 60 pounds with that kind of fine motor control over your head.
Yeah, and that’s not even mentioning the big UPS units that often run more than 200 pounds.
So, that’s why so many IT people are really actually quite well built, at least when it comes to upper-body strength.  (It’s those damn chairs and keyboards that make the weight stack up around the middle!)

But, today, I got an email from a company advertising a product called ServerLift.
Now, regular readers know that I’m pretty mercenary, so I rarely advertise anything for free, but this product looks like genius!  This thing will, according to their product literature, will lift up to 500 pounds and will let you wheel that load right up to the rack and glide it right in.  I haven’t used one myself, because I don’t work in a big server environment at the moment, but the video makes it look like lining things up is pretty simple.  And, best of all, it looks really stable and secure, so there’s less possibility of dropping a server or, like I have, bending a rail that wasn’t quite lined up right.
I cannot tell you how many times I have wished for a product just like this one!  And, so help me, if I ever get into a position where I’m in charge of a big data center again, I’ll be finding out how much these are so I can work it into the budget.
I can only imagine how many broken toes this would have saved over the years!

Well, I’m back.

Blogging, and writing in general, is like having a case of scabies; it’s a persistent itch that just will not go away!
In any case, I’m safely married and my blushing bride is hard at work on her business, so I’m back at the blog and other writing projects.  Right now, I’m working on some personal documentation off-line, in the privacy of my own directory structure, but that may eventually get shared with the larger world.  Until then, though,…
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My new ordering system at work. Based on a blog post I read weeks ago, I bought a bunch if cheap “guest checks” like wait-staff use in restaurants. The post suggested using them to take ALL your notes, but at the office I only use them to write down equipment and supply requests for the day. Then, every day at about 4:00, I can just grab my pad and place my order. So far, it’s worked great! (And, if it continues to work well, I may expand my use of the guest check pads!)

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