Server Farms and Carbon Footprints

To paraphrase a high school cheer, "Victory, victory that's my cry: V-I-C-T-O-R-Y." I've finished the 23 things, without them finishing me off.

All in all, it was good for me (was it good for you too?) -- not always fun, but educational. Sort of like library school classes in cataloging.

As I wrote in some earlier posts, the 23 things identify resources that can be used to fill particular needs of libraries and their patrons. Find a need, then consider the resources, evaluating them in terms of time and dollar cost, employee skills, and patron access to electronic gadgetry. A handy mantra might be "Be not the first by whom the new is tried, nor the last to put the old aside." Or, look before you leap. The Quechup email is an example: respond to an email about a new social networking site, and your computer is infected. Even Infopeople got caught (see their September 4th blogpost.)

And then, of course, time catches up with us, faster than we may think. A September 27, 2007 article or post in Fortune magazine's column or blog "The Browser: Analyzing the Tech Biz" is titled "Are we already moving on from traditional social networking?" Traditional! But I just got here! Imagine how non-trendy a library's web presence on a social network might be in one year. Imagine the need to keep up. Not reasons to not go online, but certainly time costs to be evaluated.

My utility company (Pacific Gas & Electric, PG&E for short, pronounced by some as "piggie") just sent out a mailer inviting customers to sign up for a program to pay some extra dollars per month to balance out the carbon footprint of the gas/electricity used. The funds will be used to provide alternative methods of energy production. I'm considering it, in part because I figure it won't cost much. According to the brochure, the cost to the average customer will be about $5 per month. Whenever PG&E (spurred on by the state Public Utilities Commission) announces a rebate on past charges, I get a lot less than the average refund, presumably because I use low amounts of gas & electricity.

Carbon footprints, however, bring up the question of the hidden environmental costs of the web. Server farms and web hosting services use massive amounts of electricity for both cooling and operation. On July 8, 2006, Fortune magazine had an interesting article or blog post, "Behold the Server Farm! Glorious Temple of the Information Age!" The subtitle started: "They're ugly. They require a small city's worth of electricity. And they're where the web happens." That rhetoric, for some reason, conjures up in my mind the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora, and their courtiers, at San Vitale in Ravenna. The mosaics would have to be inside the buildings housing the servers, as the exteriors would, at least metaphorically, be coated in carbon footprints from all that energy expended to keep photographic ephemera, among other things, online forever.

Example: I recently took a cruise, but not a camera. Searching Flickr for the cruise ship and that same itinerary produced about a trillion photos by one person who apparently spent her entire cruise with a camera to her eye, photographing everything. Someone should have told her she could poke her eye out. It was pleasant to see a photo of the fruit bowl in her cabin, looking like the one we had in ours, but perhaps the carbon emitted from power plants to keep that online forever is not worth the hidden costs to all of us. I'm reminded of a scene in the movie Soylent Green, a dystopian view of an overpopulated future, in which an elderly Edward G. Robinson wearily mounts an exercise bike to create some electricity by pedalling away ------ and gee, that's maybe a solution to the problem! Maybe server farms could provide free or cheap gyms to the surrounding populations, using the bikes (and treadmills?) to generate some of the power needed! Of course, the sweaty gymn rats would add to the need for cooling ....

23 Things #23 (callooh callay)

Yourtube, not Mytube

Others have said it better than I can:

From a tech colleague I have cited before: "YouTube -- the ultimate in channel flipping. ... YouTube let's you do it at your PC." Why do I feel this is more fun for males than females?

From a friend's email: "Pug bowling is fun to watch --- useless, but fun." (Well, it was something close to Pug bowling -- I no longer have the email.)

My library system (not SF Public Library) just installed Websense, the data protection and filtering application, on the staff computers, in part to address bandwidth problems, including increased usage of streaming audio and video. Maybe everyone was working on their 23 Things assignment at the same time?

I suppose YouTube could be used to show videos of library events, although the library pictures I noticed on Flickr tended to be fairly drab: who knows what the videos would be?

23 Things #20

Images and Imagists: poetry and pixels.

I first tried the Image generators in the last hour of the last day before I went on vacation: I was almost done in by my ususal hand-to-hand combat with computers on top of stress about getting ready for the trip: packing -- why do it in advance, when you might get run over by a streetcar, and have to answer to God why you wasted time on earth packing for a trip that wouldn't take place; cleaning for the cat sitter -- heaven forbid she thinks my cat lives in anything less than a perfect house; worrying about airport screw-ups -- whatever happened to the romance of air travel? All in all, I felt the image above summed up what I need on my computer. Thanks to Glass Giant.

Image generators brought to mind the Imagists. Ezra Pound wrote what one person termed "Imagism's enabling text:" In a Station of the Metro. I went to Flickr and searched for pictures of the paris metro: found a lot, but not quite anything that really brought to life Pound's poem. Some crowd scenes looked much jollier than his poem intimated, and none suggest that it is raining outside. So, which is truer: photos, or poetry. As a regular transit rider, I certainly feel closer to the poem than the pictures: but then, I'm not on vacation, as at least some of those photographed are.

23 Things #10

Goldengrove Unleaving

More on Flickr 4 and the groups: I searched Afghanistan hippie, and ultimately arrived at http://www.magicbus.info/. My my my -- the memories came cascading back. This site, with its links to similar sites, is addictive; I just wish more photos were posted more often.

For propriety's sake, I should mention that I made the London-Kathmandu trip in 1978 without the aid of herbal stimulants. (No, really.)

(Source for title: "Goldengrove unleaving" is from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. While searching online for it, I discovered a Jill Paton Walsh novel with that title.)

23 Things #4

Flickerings from the past

Found lots of interesting photos, although Libraries was the last thing I looked for. I searched for Afghanistan, and got a wonderful link to a group on the hippie trail: the overland route from England to Nepal and farther. A lot of the photos were from 1977, and brought back great memories of my trip in 1978. Whatever happended to some of those "fellow travelers?" I occasionally search online for them, but no luck so far.

I also searched for my hometown, and found a lot of photos. Main Street is no longer a location with working businesses, but, rather, a conglomeration of boutiques/coffee shops/restaurants. A destination spot for many on weekends, but it seems strange to have one's own town turned into what I think of as Disneyland. It's due, of course, to the town booming, and malls/office parks coming in. It's not far from where I live, so I have gone there, but one or two visits to Main Street fills my needs -- there are similar stores where I live (similar, but independents) so no need to travel far for coffee/food/boutiques.

I did rather wonder about the wisdom of one photo showing a man on a motorcycle (Main Street does attract some biker groups looking, I guess, for an independently run coffee store) -- the title was Fat Boy. Maybe that's his own choice, but, as the bumper sticker says, "The reason more people object to people wearing fur than to people wearing leather is that it's easier to harrass rich women than motorcycle riders."

I'm not sure how the subjects on Flickr work, as under Libraries was a good photo of the giant censer (incense burner) in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Some libraries had photos of local library events, which could be of interest to those attending, or good publicity on a local site for events. I liked the site with vintage postcards of libraries.

Haven't worked on mashups yet: sounds like something from a rock concert.

I didn't join any groups as I didn't feel like opening a Yahoo mail account, which comes with the signup. I can always check with groups that I like.?

23 Things #4