Learning from when things break, Seattle Tunnel-Boring Machine Repairs

You ever notice how some of the so called experts rarely talk about the things that went wrong on their projects.  They make it seem like they are perfect in their execution and anything that goes wrong is an easy fix given how smart they are.  I don’t know about you but I know of some really bad data centers out there that have been the vision of some experts.  :-)  In general, their way of getting out of accountability is they say the operations crew is to blame. 

The real experts know mistakes are made and they need to learn from them.  In Seattle is the largest tunnel-boring machine in the world and it broke.  The media went wild pointing the fingers of blame at politicians as if they know how to design and operate a tunnel-boring project.  The politician is going to say whatever they think they can to benefit their goals.  This is the mistake the so-called experts make as well, to think they can say whatever they think they can to benefit their goals.

Well when you dig a big tunnel, things go wrong.  In the case of the Seattle tunnel-boring, they went really bad requiring repair work over the cost of the boring machine.  Popular Mechanics post on the repair project and the author jumps on the media.

What do you do when the world's largest tunneling machine is, essentially, stuck in the mud? Bertha is 60 feet under the earth, and you're on the surface watching a squirmy public swap rumors of cost and delay on the $1.35 billion tunnel component of an even larger transportation project, and the naysayers are howling: Just you watch, Bertha will be abandoned like an overheated mole, boondoggle to end all boondoggles. Because, don't forget, when you're boring the world's largest tunnel, everything is bigger—not just the machine and the hole and the outsize hopes but the worries too. The cynicism. 

What do you do? 

Here's what you do: You try to tune out the media. You shrug off the peanut gallery's spitballs. You put off the finger-pointing and the lawsuits for now; that's what the lawyers are paid for afterward. You do the only thing you can do. You put your head down and you think big, one more time. You figure out how to reach Bertha and get her moving again.

The post tells the engineering story of trying to repair the tunnel-boring machine.  

The YouTube video embedded in the article is available here.

Who wants to build a Data Center in Delaware?

ZDNET writes on University of Delaware looking for someone else to build a data center after unanimously rejecting the The Data Center LLC.

Despite the unanimous vote by the board of the University of Delaware to revoke the contract with The Data Centers, LLC to build a data center and co-generation plant on their STAR campus, UD is still actively interested in finding another datacenter tenant for the site. The trick, they say, is to find a traditional datacenter operator who just wants to connect to the public power grid.

UD had been fine with the original data center plans, until the scope of the power generation facility came to the attention of community and environmental groups, who raised such a stink about the plan that it even became an issue in the most recent mayoral race in Newark, DE.

As the complaints and protests reached a crest, UD caved to the public pressure and shut the project down, backpedaling with commentary as to how the project had grown too far beyond its original scope to be suitable for their brownfield recycled automotive assembly plant site.

Do you know anyone who has a big demand for data center space in Delaware?  i don’t.  Looking at Level 3 network map it looks like the corner of Delaware is not relevant between Washington DC to NYC.  Philadelphia and New Jersey has more appeal for a data center site.

Amazon Announces 300ppi Kindle Voyage, $199, shipping Oct 21, 2014

The Kindle is part of my regular reading and today Amazon announced the Kindle Voyage.

I live in Seattle and have known many friends who joined Amazon.  I use amazon.com for business and home supplies with 2 day shipping with Amazon Prime.  So I am regularly on amazon.com, and saw the Voyage was available to order.  And being able to have 300ppi black and white text is so geeky for those who worked on printing technology.

I picked iPhone 6, my friend picked 6 Plus, Why?

A data center friend who is a loyal iPhone user and I both ordered iPhone 6s on Sept 12.  We were both going to order iPhone 6 regular, but then he decided to order the Plus.  I stuck with the Regular.  I tried logging on to the order websites at Apple and AT&T at 12:01a on Sept 12.  After 15 minutes of trying I gave up and went to sleep.  My friend stayed online and finally got his order in at 2:30a.  I was asleep.  :-)  Got up at 6a, tried ordering from Apple site. Got frustrated and went to AT&T.  

We both ordered 128GB models.  Why?  Because pushing GB of data on wireless to devices takes time.  So, we both said let’s treat the iPhone 6 as a storage device.  Besides with a 10GB data plan you can easily go through the data use quickly.  As one of my friends said he knows of someone whose daughter gradually pushed the data plan spend to $2,000 a month as she watched Netflix anywhere she wanted.  Dude, disable the use of cel data by Netflix.  I did.

My friend ordered the Plus when he realized his huge protective case for his iPhone 5 made it just as big as a Plus, and he figured why not give it a try.  Worse case he returns it or sells it.  He ordered at 2:30a and still has to wait 3-4 weeks.

I ordered a iPhone 6 regular.  Why?  I have been a user of Galaxy Note since 1, and have a 3.  So I am used to having 1920x1280 display.  I carry my iPhone with me all the time.  The Galaxy Note 3 is more like my work device.  Having a Phablet for 3 years I know what it is like to have a phone that people make fun of because it is too big.  Now that the iPhone 6 Plus is coming out, Samsung has chosen to say how it is being copied.

Can you coerce people to think Mobile, Cloud, and Data First? IBM tries

I made the switch years ago to think about Mobile, Cloud, and Data as the ways to build solutions.  Mobile devices are with people so much more than a laptop or desktop so information is at your fingertips more often.  The Cloud gets you around the monopoly of internal IT organizations and lets you scale faster.  Data has changed from the forms people fill out to be stored in a SQL database which had comfort and control for those who controlled the database schema, to put anything you want in a key value pair approach.

A name–value pair, key–value pair, field–value pair or attribute–value pair is a fundamental data representation in computing systems and applications. Designers often desire an open-ended data structure that allows for future extension without modifying existing code or data. In such situations, all or part of the data model may be expressed as a collection of tuples <attribute name, value>; each element is an attribute–value pair.

The problem is the transition for people who lived in software licenses of applications and the associated hardware can be difficult.

IBM is trying to coerce its staff.

IBM ruffles feathers in push to re-educate veteran employees for cloud, data, mobile

by Barb Darrow

17 HOURS AGO

2 Comments

• A
• A

photo: Shutterstock / B Calkins

SUMMARY:

Some IBM Global Technology Services employees have been told they keep their jobs (and 90 percent of their pay) as long as they retrain on hot new technologies.