LiveJournal.com, for much of today: “Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We’re currently dealing with bringing our 100 servers back online. Not fun. We’re not happy about this. Sorry… :-/ More details later.”

I recall looking at some hosting facilty just when they opened, looking for facilities for our tiny set of boxes. I think we may have gone with them too. I had the stupid role in the movie where the other people get to fiddle with the gear and I answered the cell phone over and over again, hand holding increasingly far-removed-from me upper-ups.

The best one was when we sweet-talked our way past the night-time security guy even though we didn’t have any good credentials or the passphrase, and then talked our way into the on-site tech-staff’s glass room to get a clean test connection to our boxen from outside our class C.

It sounds like a bad movie from the eighties, huh? Apparently we got everyone in trouble there because of this but I went to bat for them, since I could have yanked our account there.

Other things I remember from the hosting center: the deep chill of the rooms, cooled to keep the hardware from overheating. The black-enameled hard wire mesh that enclosed many other clients’ systems, keeping information caged, as it were. The dizzy-headed 3am feeling that somehow we’d become ensnared in some sort of hacker wet dream or pulp novel. Arriving onsite as the sun set and leaving as dawn pinked the sky. The 2001-like all-over flourescent brightness of the space. The plastic-and-lacquer gas-off smell of new computers and freshly installed network paneling.

Battle Lesssons, by Dan Baum, in the January 5 issue of the New Yorker.

In March of 2000, with the help of a Web-savvy West Point classmate and their own savings, they put up a site on the civilian Internet called Companycommand.com. It didn’t occur to them to ask the Army for permission or support. Companycommand was an affront to protocol. The Army way was to monitor and vet every posting to prevent secrets from being revealed, but Allen and Burgess figured that captains were smart enough to police themselves and not compromise security. Soon after the site went up, a lieutenant colonel phoned one of the Web site’s operators and advised them to get a lawyer, because he didn’t want to see “good officers crash and burn.” A year later, Allen and Burgess started a second Web site, for lieutenants, Platoonleader.org.

Fascinating. It would be interesting to look at the sites to see how they are similar to and different from less life-and-death online communities.

This week’s issue also includes a pretty wonderful profile of Miyazaki by Margaret Talbot, in which we learn that the great man is quite the pessimist. Talbot seems surprised by this, as Miyazaki’s films are notable in their lack of mean-spiritedness. This surprises me, as in my experience, it is optimists that create many of life’s small cruelties.