John went to City Hall again yesterday to discuss the permits for
the final phase of the WP668 caboose move and utilities hook up. The
representative of the planning department reviewed our application
materials and approved them for formal submission next week – Hooray!
John also made the formal submission to the water district.
Both organizations said everything looks good. We still have
to go through the rest of the special permitting process with the
planning department but so far, so good.
The application materials we have been developing are printed on very
large sheets of paper (24″ x 36″) and include maps, satellite views,
street photos, site diagrams, blueprints, descriptions of what is there
now and what is proposed, etc.
I went by the
Project Blackbox announcement in Sun’s parking lot today. I even
collected one of the nifty toy trucks with a Sun Blackbox as the trailer.
It is sitting on my desk next to my red HO-scale model caboose.
The prototypes for these two models have much in common.
Having worked on a caboose-which-will-be-my-office for about
nine months now, using a shipping container as a virtualized datacenter
makes good sense to me. A caboose was originally a mobile office (including
self contained records and records storage on the train’s cars and cargo)
as well as a rest area for the crew. A railroad caboose contained
much smaller amounts of information than a modern data center.
However, like a Sun Blackbox shipping container, a caboose was a
large, heavy, largely self-contained, robust, yet mobile container for
storing complex units of information in a form which could be swapped
in or out quickly (as needed with every car coming into or leaving
the train).
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