True Geeks dream!

Last week I was informed that our Palo Alto office was contacted by Cisco, who is intrested in funding and setting up a sattelite studio in their building. (I am a trainer/administrator for an Organization that records audio digitally for distribution to students on CD-ROM. We have 30 Studios across the country, which I travel to frequently sometimes.)

Anyway, when I heard that Cisco was interested in us, I was like "Oh, man!" Anyway, I started going on to my boss about how cool it would be if they were to fund a dedicated fiber channel from their building to our Palo Alto Studio for transfer of audio projects (a VERY long term goal that we'd been discussing already.) So now my boss wants me to go meet with one of the honchos from Cisco in early March to pitch the idea!

I'm so siked! I'm going to contact them this week maybe to set up a tour or something cool like that (this building apparently houses 7000+ employees). To a geek, this is like the equivlant of Disney World, The Playboy Mansion and the World Series...all rolled into one.

I can't wait to check out their facilities! (server rooms, etc. not bathrooms)

Maybe I'll just stay out there and never come back Wonder how my wife would feel about relocating?


Steve

 

damn.. have fun man! and if you can take pictures

 

If they don't confiscate your camera on sight, that is

That is definatly cool...

 

Well, the Cisco thing went really well. Man, their setup is impressive. First of all, the buildings (8 total on one campus which probably equals three city block, they have shuttles to transport employees around to the different buildings) actually house around 12,000 employees.

After the meeting, we got a little "mini-tour", which was about all they had time for, but man, was it cool. We walked into one of the server rooms and I was like "Boingggggg!" . I don't know...something about racks and racks of servers and switches and miles of cable all over the place just gets me excited. Is that weird?

San Jose was just so cool! My flight home wasn't untill 8 p.m., so I had a lot of time to kill. I went to the Intel museum and hung out there for about two hours - very cool. There is a Tech Museum that I was told is really cool as well, but I actually couldn't find it. I'll tell you though, all the big companies are all right there. Within the same three square miles, there is Google, Ebay, Adobe, McAfee, Intel, and tons more. And all of them are HUGE. I was just in awe the whole time.

I started thinking...I wonder if my wife would consider relocating??? I was talking to someone out there about real estate, and it turns out in that area, a small two or three bedroom ranch goes for around 2 to 3 million! Oh well, I guess I won't be moving any time soon.

Anyway, if you want to take a "Geeks Vacation", go to San Jose. Or, to keep the wife/girlfreind happy, go to San Fransisco, it's only about a half-hour north. That way, theres plenty for her to see/do. Women don't seem to get too excited over routers and switches



Steve

 

I once told my girlfriend about a data center I got to take a tour of once. I told her once I walked in and "BOING!" and she got upset and told me I was sick and wrong to react that way to a piece of equipment. A few weeks later Ford introduced the first images of the 2005 Mustang (girlfriend loves the mustang), she then told me when she saw the pictures she experienced the female equivalent of "BOING!" and when I tried to point out the similarity to the conversation we'd had about the data center she ignored me. Of course I'm sure shouting out who's sick and wrong now didn't help...

 

I'm with you. My uncle moved to San Jose to work at Atari and then later Apple. I've been out there many times and it is always the same. WOOHOO! Love it.