Durham, NC

Celerra

Well, I'm in Durham, NC learning about the Celerra so I can properly manage the one my employer recently bought. Training has been intense, spending 8 hours per day in the classroom with about half actually in the lab, plus another 3 to 4 hours in the evening reviewing and typing up my notes and working with the labs some more (they are remotely available for the duration of the class). The instructor is quite good, the training materials are OK (fewer errors than one might expect), and the labs are useful. The lab is all setup on virtual machines, including W2k3 servers, Sun Solaris stations, and W2K workstations, along with the Celerra. There are two students to each Celerra, so it is easy for one person to run thru a lab exercise, erase the changes, and then the other student can run thru the exercises. The course cost $5,000 per person (yes, $1,000/day!), so one should expect it to be of high quality. 8 of the 12 students are EMC employees taking advantage of training they qualify for.

EMC's facility here is an R&D one, so there isn't much to see. Some students took advantage today to attend a demo of some alpha code. I skipped it because I don't consider myself qualified to comment on it and I felt that my time would be better spent working on the labs. Besides that, I've seen plenty of alpha code; what I'd like to see is some mature code just once in a while. I know, it will never happen.

I had hoped that I might drive down here, but my employer insisted that I fly. So, I'm limited to traveling where I'm willing to pay the cab to take me, which is basically around the block.

So, here is a collage of some of what I've seen. Nothing special, just things you might see anywhere. There's nothing in this picture that is essentially NC. Doesn't look like I'm going to be able to find anything that is; it's not a sight-seeing trip.

A little trivia: You will note that, although it's mostly written as "EMC", the correct name of the company is EMC², which was supposed to symbolize “Eagan Morino Computing Company". Pretty clever, eh?

This area is known as RTP, for more info see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Triangle_Park.

H1N1 - again

Well, at this point H1N1 doesn't look as bad as originally feared. It is a new flu virus, and it is spreading, but it doesn't appear to be any worse than any other of the flus it is related to.