[HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI

[Dave McGuire]

On 4/22/20 4:48 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
>>  I had no idea it was that bad where you are.  
> 
>   California has a lot of problems.  PG&E is one of those problems.  It's also a really nice place to live...

  No insult intended, but it really doesn't sound like it.

  (besides, it's dangerous, everything causes cancer there!)

  My epiphany in Florida was a simple and logical one.  I have a certain
lifestyle; it involves things of high mass, large size, and high power
consumption. (minicomputers, mainframes, and laboratory equipment)
Further, I'm a person for whom "room temperature" is about 65 degrees F,
and I have a very narrow thermal "comfort range".  When I sleep, I want
it to be about 61 degrees F in the bedroom. (amazingly my wife's thermal
preferences are the same as mine!)

 In Florida, I was living in an area where both space and power were
very expensive. (nowhere near the insanity that is California, but
still)  The outdoor temperature rarely dropped below 85 degrees F in the
summer, even in the evenings, and in the winter it's not much better,
high 70s.  Everything (EVERYTHING) I do in my life generates heat that I
have to pay to have removed.

  In Florida, with very little hardware running (one rack of servers),
in a 2300 square foot house, my power bill was about $700 per month,
year round.

  In Pennsylvania, in my main building (not the museum building), only
one floor of which is fully climate controlled (and that one floor is
6,000 square feet), my power bills rarely hit $250/mo.  And I'm running
some old iron (just for me personally, apart from the museum) 24/7,
including two small VAXen and a PDP-11/83, a serious Ethernet switch
(Cisco 6503) and a few servers.

  In other words, I now live in a place that actually matches my lifestyle.

  Nobody seems to think that way, and I can't understand why.  It pains
me to think that I went through the first 41 years of my life (I'm 51
now) living miserably in places where I just did not fit.

  (Yes yes yes, this is off-topic, but only marginally, and hell, we are
social creatures living in forced isolation due to a pandemic, and we
are all friends.)

              -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA