It's been a fun meeting day. I had a meeting with Alan where we went over all the stuff we've done so far this summer and all the stuff we have yet to do. It was a meeting where I got to burble happily, which is always a good thing. I have an amazingly productive office, thanks to a superior staff, and it makes for a pleased superior. Furthermore, the new network works well and didn't interrupt most people, which is itself amazing and positive.

On the other hand, we've lost one of our two doors leading into our wiring closet. The fire marshall ordered a fire door erected in an archway right next to our MDF (which means wiring closet, I don't know why) back/shipping door. The fire door has to be magnetically held open all of the time, so that in an emergency it can drop shut. I don't know why this is either.

The only way to do that in that archway was to take out the MDF door and put up drywall with a single magnetic unit on it. Thus, in the event of a fire, the door will shut and protect people from the only exit in that hallway, and someone in the MDF will die a horrible death.

It is worth pointing out no one told us about this plan.

Our MDF is amazingly narrow -- it wasn't meant to be a primary network hub. It was meant, in the days of history, to pass steam upstairs from the furnace. There is an odd symmetry to its current function, which is to pass information upstairs from the (separate) server bay. But as it wasn't designed for this function, there is barely six feet of room between the walls. Which, if you put in large racks full of condenser hubs and switches, means you have about three feet to access the front of panels and no room to access the back.

The back door let us get to the wiring on the back, and further allowed us to bring boxes and units bigger than three feet into the MDF. We can no longer do either.

We also have sophisticated fire suppression equipment in that room, so that the slightest smolder will bring clouds of gas into the room designed to snuff it out. This is because a sprinkler system would turn $200,000 worth of electrical equipment into junk far faster than most fires would.

It was installed four years ago, before most "life friendly" fire supression equipment existed or was marketed. This system is designed, in effect, to destroy all the oxygen in the room in a fire, thus snuffing any flames out.

So, if someone is in the back of the room, next to a dozen fans making noise, doesn't realize there's a smolder in the front part of the room and doesn't hear the hissing sound of the equipment (there may be an alarm as well, I don't know), suddenly he'll be in the back of a corridor with no air. He won't know what's going on. He likely will think he's having a heart attack. He may or may not panic. He may or may not move around the equipment and flee to the other end of the room and open the door and live.

He can no longer turn and open the door next to him and live. This is not a good design plan.

This is all very unlikely to happen, but I have a vested interest in this. I don't want someone dying in my MDF because some idiot lit a cigarette in that room. I don't want that someone to be me.

So, I've leveraged this into moving our plans for office expansion up several notches. It'll get resolved, and soon. Alan's behind it. So, good enough.

I also had a meeting with the Dean of the Summer School, about the class I'm teaching. I'm excited about it. It's great to have the freedom to design a course however I'd like to teach it. I'm going to use "In The Beginning There Was The Command Line" as a text for it. It's amazingly cool to have that option and power. I'm really looking forward to teaching this.

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One year ago today, I got my new car, the second incarnation of Rubicon. It's a Saturn SL-2 and it still looks pristine.

I'll talk about it at length tomorrow, and how it relates to my first car, which was a used Honda Accord which I loved passionately. But for today, it makes sense to merely mark the occasion, and note that I'm one year of car payments down. Yay.

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505 words on Fairhaven yesterday, but I also wrote 2,000 words of necessary backstory and notes, which you need to do to turn an idea into a real story. Especially given the naming conventions. This is heroic fantasy set in a fake Medieval Britain as so many of these things are, so I decided to use real Old English names for the average people. However, I've got a Royal Family, who I'm setting off by using Teutonic names (kind of my statement on the current "British" Monarchy). I have some bards who will appear now and again, so I've opted for Celtic names for them. And one story of the Elves -- who disappeared a thousand years before -- listed their names, so I used Welsh, since Welsh is a language that is melodious but looks alien to human eyes.

This makes for notes. I consider myself a good person. 4,175 words into the book so far.