Leavingoldhabits

I’m not with that company anymore, but given the right audience, ‘that time the server room blew up’ is a big hit.

It could have gone way worse. A stressful lesson and a good story is best case scenario outcome when stuff hits the fan.

Years ago I worked for a large-ish post production company. They had recently moved into a swanky new location and everything there was tailored to spec, including the server room. In norwegian we sometimes call a server room a ‘machine room’, this is relevant.

As a part of the server room spec, a dry fire suppression system was among the requirements.

The summer of the incident was particularly hot, and we experienced some trouble with our cooling, so a cooling technician was called to have a look. While he was working on the unit inside the server room, he made a mistake that caused all the cooling gas to dump into the room, triggering the fire extinguishers.

A dry fire system works by releasing an inert gas into a space to displace any oxygen, effectively choking any fire. I imagine this is usually done by some solenoids opening some canisters of gas and the room quickly, but gradually becomes oxygen free. Luckily, my boss at the time was present and he quickly got both himself and the tech to safety.

All good right? No. The contractor who constructed the new location had ordered and installed a system meant for maritime machine rooms, not the computer ‘machine room’ we had. In an environment filled with fuel and grease, you optimize towards filling the room with an inert gas as quickly as possible, and it turns out they use explosives to complete the task. In this room there were three canisters in the ceiling with fire shooting out of them, burning pellets to generate the inert gas. The gas and smoke from the canisters combined with the leaked cooling gas, and started condensing.

Into hydrochloric acid.

While all this was going on, all of the servers and workstations were happily humming along, sucking the now extremely corrosive atmosphere into themselves, making sure that every nook and cranny inside and outside got covered in a thin greasy film of acid.

The aftermath: Mine and two colleagues’s summer break was cut short, as we were called in to do damage control. Ripping out and wiping hard drives clean was what we did all summer. With external help we managed to recover all of the data. One feature film was delayed a few weeks. The insurance payout actually made the company a bit ahead financially. As far as I know there’s still burn marks in the floor of the server room, from when flames shot out of the fire extinguishers. Everyone involved now knows what a proper dry fire suppression system for a server room looks like.

The kicker is, the cooling was messed up because a fabric awning on the building had fallen down and was covering the air intake. If anyone had thought to check the roof this whole thing would have been avoided, and that server room would probably still have bombs attached to its ceiling.

Good ifra, unfortunately my engineering skills stop at desk-sized

Hah! Thanks, I’ll let you know! Maybe I can set up some guerilla style exhibition in a nearby alley 😂

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback. I don’t crop shots done with this camera, I want to preserve the organic borders and learn to live with what is captured without messing too much with it.

However, I halfway agree with your observation, on a small screen this really could do with a tighter framing, or maybe bringing the model closer to the camera. But in a larger print (this is one of two shots Ive printed in 80x80 cm), the airy composition works really well.

I refuse to ignore you!

That webside felt like cancer

Deus Ex is amazing, if you can get passed the aged graphics, it’s a masterclass in storytelling and game design.

That’s really nice

Slightly toast two slices of whole grain bread in a buttered pan, between them, you put butter fried chanterelle mushrooms, sprinkle with a pinch of salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Bonus points if you found the the chanterelles yourself.

As for busy road at night, I’m afraid that with this way of doing scanning photography it would be quite uninteresting. The motion is way too quick, and cars would render as with either weird vertical lines or very small diagonal squiggles, depending on which direction you scan.

I suggest looking up some talks by the Italian photographer Adam Magyar, he’s done some great talks on transchronologal (?) photography, and is a great artist himself.

I love the small insights into signal theory/processing generated by this image, this is really cool stuff! Thank you for chiming in.

Of course there’s some ancient broadcast standard at the bottom of 44.1khz, thanks for the clarification! (I work in film/TV and still struggle with explaining explaining ‘illegal’ values to some clients on certain deliverables)