Day 650, Command Console

The Mighty Wurlitzer

The command console.

It's a standing desk

That keyboard needs a clean.

Look at the size of that bolt.

A bottle opener?*

* Available for hire.

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Day 649, Aphid 2, now green death gets serious

Those words should be spoken by Don LaFontaine as the summing up after "In a world where chilli plants are under attack..." 

Getting bored with squish, squish, squish, I decided to take a more methodical, less green fingered approach.  Using a scalpel, some cheap reading glasses and a piece of kitchen towel, I went into battle.

The tiny aphid offspring were suddenly visible, and using the scalpel it was possible to flick them onto the paper towel where they could be squashed with the flat of the blade.  Key areas to locate the buggers are generally around the flower stalks, although sometimes they venture onto the undersides of leaves if they're feeling particularly cosmopolitan.  Looking for shed skin cases is a useful way of tracking them, they are white and look very like a small aphid, these will be seen on the soil or on leaves, and there may often be a recently enlarged beast specimen directly above.  Tidy away any skin cases as new ones will give an indication of further pest activity.

Ten minutes of checking chilli plants three times a day has reduced the population to the point where I need much greater magnification reading glasses.  Either that or the aphid population has been vanquished.*

I'm pretty sure there are still aphids there, tiny, not yet old enough to reproduce, waiting for me to go out.  And as long as I spot them before they get to a week old and pop out more clones then this out of control game of life may become void.

Rules for minimum viable population are probably not the same for aphids reproducing via parthenogenesis.  Infestation from soil borne eggs and winged aphid invaders is also a risk, especially with non-sterilised soil and an environment which it isn't possible to isolate or hermetically seal.**  The only real answer is scorched earth, and that won't produce me any chillies.

With the above in mind, and Don's voice reverberating between my ears, I will steel myself to continue the deadly battle.

Green death gets serious, if only the Doctor and an assistant were available.

* Fat chance.
** In one of their incarnations they give birth to live young, in another they can lay eggs, in another they can fly - sneaky buggers.


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Day 648, Mainframe Temperature Chart

It's been a long time since there was a mainframe in our machine room, but up until recently there were still a few relics of the original installation.

The room that was slightly larger than the size of a basketball court has since been partitioned into a much smaller space.  Even in the much smaller space there is a lot of available room, partly due to more powerful computing having a much smaller footprint than previously, and also because we make great use of virtualisation.

Now in rack space no larger than a couple of washing machines we run over 1200 servers.

When the partitioning work took place, in the early 2000's, I liberated this piece of monitoring kit to use as a desk ornament.  It's a Honeywell circular chart used to plot temperature over the time period of a week.  There were probably similar charts to record humidity.  On the panel I removed the chart from there were large indicator lamps to display alert states, and there were outsized and clunky switches to set different modes, all very 1960's in appearance, a classic period.

This chart doesn't appear to have ever been used, although it does have a spreading ink mark where the pen was left in stationary contact with the paper, like a failed chromatography experiment.

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Day 647, Induced entropy

Door of the day.

If it isn't open then consider how you would open it.

But don't break it.

You might say -

"That's easy for you to say, you have the key."

But I don't have the key.

"But you know the combination."

I don't know the combination.

"You know someone inside that will let you in."

That is not the case, and if there were they would not be prepared to do that unless the requirements had been satisfied.*

* Gnomic pronouncement while waiting for iManager plugins to install.

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Day 646, Leverage

Miscellaneous objects held aloft using science.*

Using the technology of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and paper wedging, this shelf is secure enough to sleep a family of four.**

Assuming that's a family of hamsters.***

It would look even more impressive if the really heavy objects to the right were in view.****

* The power of listening to experts.
** Fine tolerances of wedging were adjusted using folded paper, this is a legitimate construction technique.
*** No hamsters were harmed in the making of this shelf.
**** That's overplaying it, it isn't an engineering feat of any significance let alone that of something on the scale of the Clifton suspension bridge.

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Day 645, Aphid busting

That's one way to get green fingers.

Squish, squish, squish.

Two or three times a day, check to see if they've returned, and if they have...

Squish, squish, squish.

Then wipe off the honeydew.

Chilli plants getting eaten by the sap-sucking little blighters?

Who ya gonna call?

Aphid busters.*

I ain't afraid of no parthenogenetic little insects

* This is not being offered as a professional service.

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Day 644, Old Tat

Hands up if you remember Compaq?

This is some of the guff that used to come with servers.  There's a bunch of documentation, some SmartStart CD's, and various other bits and bobs to assist with the setting up process.

As this server was installed before Compaq were acquired by HP it must be from earlier than 2002.  In fact it is probably from 2000 and could be from among the first few servers that I installed after arriving in post - I wouldn't have used the SmartStart CD.

The Compaq hardware has long since left the building.

It's probably about time we had a clear out of the associated bumpf.

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