In 1990s Chicago, old friend Greg Dunlap and I had a 4th of July tradition where we served sweet explosive revenge to all the computer equipment that had given us grief that year. There was never a shortage. Pizza box PCs with flaky mobos, monitors on the blink, maddening mice, PC keyboards whose backslash keys were broken (think about that for a minute, DOS users), stubborn routers: each was queued and dispatched with extreme prejudice using the finest explosives the neighboring State of Indiana could offer.
Greg has since moved to Sweden, a nation where displays of a less militant sort are commonplace. For example, rather than use gunpowder to take out frustrations relating to living in the Arctic, Swedes instead gather in the darkness to construct idealized models of a society that while intricate and delicious, would not survive a serious coffee spill.
You can take the software engineer out of the US, but can you take the US out of the software engineer? Is it unreasonable that Greg, upon facing this year’s hardware irritation, might feel just the barest twinge of homesickness for the recreational (and other) explosion capital of the world?
Of course it’s not unreasonable. Which is why the fine people at Data Center Knowledge put together this awesome video Gallery of Exploding Servers available with merely a click.
Assuming the mouse works, I mean.
RW370 