I am going to begin this blog with some historical re-posting several blog entries I have made on my much more mainstreamed blog over at Mephistos. I find, while looking at those post from so long ago, that I feel even stronger about the topic today then I did those months or in some cases even years ago. A few of them will have some new comments added to the context, others will be verbatim, short of some grammar and picture updates. In addition, I will be posting some new posts interspersed within those old posts that I am revisiting. One last thing and then I will include the old post of yester-year, I intend to have a post every day for the month of April and will often time use the very appropriate theme of Growing from the NaBlaPoMo.
The following, titled Weather, Technology, and Farming originally was originally published by me on 31st of January, 2008. Interestingly enough, I had similar thoughts to some of what is in this blog from over a year ago just a few days back. We had cloudy overcast skies that threatened mostly gentle showers throughout the morning hours. I had several Facebook friends that were complaining about the rain. I was personally be thankful for it, as two weeks prior I had gotten pasture that had seen the worse for wear last year over-seeded with a good mix for the horses. Beyond that, I was thinking of how the last two years we have had a relatively wet late winter and spring only to have the tap cut off come mid to late June. This of course has resulted in little pasture in the fall, short hay harvest, and in general very expensive upkeep of all livestock. My comments back were to the effect of let it rain and be thankful.
I have stated elsewhere how I am a study of opposites – especially when it comes to such things as my desire to be farming and working outside, with horses versus what I actually do with technology. Normally, aside from minor record keeping with the farm tasks, there is very little overlap between the two. However, that changed the other day, interestingly enough because of the weather. And it occurred to me how often this is the case.
In general with the farm, especially growing crops and with delicate lifestock like horses, weather is something that we keep an eye on. If there are winter storms, flooding, severe weather, or what have you we make changes in the daily routines and check on animals a lot more often. In some of those cases, as a winter or especially a spring storm blows in we will often put them up in the barn – often just in the nick of time.
Case in point of how this relates to my career in information technology. Every day that I see a big severe storm on the forecast I am always doing extra checking to make sure that systems are staying online, that I continue to have power to my servers, and that my multiple telecommunications connections are still online. Just this past week, we had a fairly severe storm (of a spring nature, lots of wind, lightning, rain) blow in – the severity of which caught me and apparently most forecasters by a bit of surprise. Anyway, I came out of a restaurant and everything was dark in the area. This including my server locations.
Just like I would do as a storm was coming in with the horses, I went into an emergency mode taking care of getting servers offline before the batteries died and eventually the restoration of everything once power was restored. Anyway, the point of all this, now I have twice as much reason to be the weather junky that I have typically been in the past.
** – Originally published on Mephistos on 31st of January, 2008.