Went to Chicago on Saturday last to pick up young squire Noah for the xmas holidays. We spent an extra day in the windy city so as to lessen the wearying effects of travelling, and also to take a gander at some exhibits at the Art Institute. We actually ended up spending 5 hours trekking around the institute, and Noah made many fabulous pieces of paper furniture at one of the kids’ exhibits. He could have an excellent future as a designer of furniture, though he maintains that drawing’s where it’s really at.

Yesterday we bought cheap saucer sleds and trekked over to the hill @ Longfellow School which is about 2 blocks from my house. The neighborhood kids had already packed the snow into an amazing surface. Those saucers are killer in those conditions. Totally fast and out of control. Noah and I would lay at the bottom like rag dolls and then stagger back up the hill for more.

Then we went to the store where I peddle used books once a week, and of course there were Goosebumps for a quarter. Which is what you see Noah reading in the picture, at breakfast.

Today we woke up to a fresh 6 inches of snow! Totally beautiful, and totally what I feel like Iowa Winter should be like. It’s the first time in a few years that we’ve had this much snow. It’s been warm enough to enjoy being outside, and I know there is some good sledding in my near future.

In the last 2 weeks, we’ve gotten several inches of snow here in Iowa City. It’s been very nice, actually. It’s like what winter in Iowa is supposed to be (although The Pirate, who is obsessed wtih our changing climate, tells me that this is a “colder than usual Fall“). This weekend, there are plans for sledding..and for the first time in 3 years or so, there might actually be snow on the ground when Noah makes his annual xmas visit. This would be great, because I’ve been itching to take him sledding, something he can’t do in his home state of Arizona, usually.

In other news, it was an exciting day for us in Research Information Systems and Gilmore Hall yesterday. In years past, during colder temperatures, the University Facilities folks have put plywood over the steam tunnel grates (for those of you who aren’t IC natives, our campus is underlaid by miles of steam tunnels, connecting and heating all sorts of UI buildings, and this is actually true of many Universities). Anyway, someone thought the plywood was unattractive, so they haven’t been covered the last 2 years.

As a result, on Wednesday night when temperatures dropped significantly, some water pipes froze and then burst. Conveniently, those pipes were located near steam pipes and when water burst from the frozen pipes, it hit the steam pipes and sent a burst of steam through the tunnel..and into the voice/data closet that’s located in our building. This steam cloud took down the LAN in 2 buildings.

So Gilmore Hall’s entire network was down 3/4 of the day yesterday. Everything was soaked (the steam acutally created a ton of standing water througout the tunnel and in that closet), and moisture got into the switches, basically frying them.

Somehow voice still worked okay, but the network routers fried and we had to wait for new equipment to be installed. Once that was running, we discovered that the initial switch sizzle also took out a few wall jacks and severl NIC cards in users’ computers. It’s been a fun few days. We currently offer file + print services to ~160 users, and application services for researchers all across campus and throughout the area, so this was significant downtime for some of our clients. The silver lining is that we were upgraded to Gigabit earlier than had been planned.

Hopefully the right people on campus will now decide that hideous plywood is cheaper than 10 hours of downtime, split pipes, broken fire-protection systems and fried Cisco routers..

Lastly, I’ve been playing with a nifty + free tool called FreeMind this afternoon. I’ve been charged with writing up our department’s disaster recovery plan, and am using this tool for brainstorming. Also am using yesterday’s outage as an excellent scenario upon which to base the plan! I think I may have been one of the only people to be really excited by the whole incident, and took copious notes most of the day.

I originaly read about this tool at Uncertainty Distribution, a blog authored by my friend Carrie, who’s using it as a tool to help her keep track of and prioritize her dissertation. Thanks Carrie!

p.s. comments are fixed!