I hadn’t showered in three days (yuck). I hadn’t shaved in 13. I haven’t slept long enough to dream in 9. I went from an absolute novice in building infrastructure to an expert in 3. And tomorrow is payday.

Our small crew of 4 moved 76 people from noon on Saturday until about 8 pm tonight from our old location in Belltown to our new digs on the Seattle waterfront. Desks, chairs, computers, personal knick knacks, everything. And then we put it all back together so these people don’t lose a single second when they arrive tomorrow. The “betas” as I call ‘em, are the execs, finance, marketing, product, gaming and engineering (ok, engineering doesn’t count since we can fix everything ourselves) departments and they’ll show up at 8 am tomorrow expecting to sit in their new seat and work as they would in the old office.

The actual physical move was the easy part. The hard part was getting to that point with many, many, many close calls that had me aborting the move within minutes. WAN connection, LAN connections (about 400 Ethernet drops), lighting and HVAC issues were the killers. We worked literally non-stop, 24/7 in overlapping but unscheduled shifts, some of us not sleeping for days and going 13-15 without food on some occasions. Since we’re too small to have a dedicated move team, we also had to keep up with our regular jobs and that proved to be the biggest challenge. It wasn’t until Thursday when my COO finally told the company that Engineering was off limits to everyone until the move. I’d been telling him I need that for almost two weeks but at least I got it.

I cleaned up tonight and will do my best to act like all this was nothing when first internal customers start arriving tomorrow. Funny thing is that this weekend was nothing. The final 200 come next week. Chaos will ensue.

I did take a small break tonight and captured this picture from our balcony at sunset:

I converted my Tivo file into the .avi format and you can download the entire Almost Live! 2005 Reunion Special HERE (right click and choose “save as”. You can play it in Windows Media Player. 351 Megabytes.

If you have trouble playing the file in Windows Media Player 10, download this small player that comes bundled with the .avi codec.

Codec info:

Enjoy.

“Bush: One of the worst disasters to hit the U.S.”

That may be true, but I wouldn’t exactly call that “BREAKING NEWS.” And who says we have a Republican media corps????

Awesome…

I haven’t written much lately because my troubles and opinions seem incredibly insignificant when compared with those of the residents of New Orleans. I’m sure I’ll take some criticism on this but I’ve been worrying most about the helpless animals who’ve lost their owners and are trapped in cages or kennels. They’re scared, hungry and have no idea what’s happened to them. As a result, I can’t even watch the news anymore as every new pet story brings to much to bear. A friend of mine named Brad who is a Veterinarian at the Redmond Veterinary Hospital went down to New Orleans earlier this week to help provide medical care to the animals left in Katrina’s wake. While I salute him, I cannot fathom being exposed to what he is likely to see.

Mandatory evacuations have begun and authorities are not letting people leave with their animals which I cannot understand. If I were asked to leave without my kids, there would be one helluva fight and someone would end up being hurt pretty badly, possibly myself. Pets are family members too and deserve equal treatment especially since the worst is over. At the very least, “rescuers” need to drop the humans off and make an immediate return to retrieve the animals.

One story that really grabbed my attention was the story of Ms. Kitty. The MSNBC.com Katrina Blog has been chronicling the search for Bill Harris’ cat, Ms. Kitty the past few days and I was happy to see that finally there was a happy ending.

Although I couldn’t make it down there, I made a financial donation to the non-profit animal welfare organization Noah’s Wish. Their website is so swamped that they haven’t even been able to keep up and their server has been down. Although I’m sure they have more pressing concerns, I did offer to help with hosting and have some serious resources (two, load balanced dual AMD Opteron 248s with 8 GB RAM and Gig-E ports) to be able to do that. I want to at least keep their site up so people can make donations. If you are able, please consider making a donation via Paypal.

Thanks for reading.

Things are back to normal on my server but I haven’t had the time to write much since my company is moving into it’s new headquarters starting Tuesday and it’s my job to make sure we have connectivity and the ability to support a business with 300 people.