Day 2: The Data Center

Well, it's been another long day.  It started with a teleconference
with folks in California at 9am.  Then catching up with email and
to-do tasks.  Break for a short walk around the neighborhood, mainly
to see just how humid it's going to be today.  Answer: *very* humid.
Apparently yesterday (Monday) was a fluke.

Perhaps the humidity came in with the rain last night, as I was
leaving the Data Center.  I hadn't brought my raincoat with me
yesterday.  However, Fukasawa-san found the Gemini company umbrella in
the collective umbrella stand.  Those guys think of everything.

I brought the umbrella with me to the Data Center after lunch.  Lunch
was a bento box (plastic tray, not the wooden boxes you'd find in
restaurants) for 500 yen.  A young lady had a bicycle + refrigerator
cart about a block away from the hotel.  Oh, and a miso & clam soup
tourine.

The bento had: rice with cooked & flaked salmon sprinkled on top,
eggplant, a bit of pickled cabbage, a fish ball (with a little sauce
remarkably close to something I'd find with Swedish meatballs), two
pieces of sweet potato, a hunk of scrambled egg, a bit of crab, and a
wonderful whitefish that, if it had been smoked, would've been about
identical to the smoked whitefish you can find just about anywhere on
the Lake Superior north shore.  Verdict: a damn yummy bargain.

Since my entire reason for being here is to provide support to
Hitachi, I'll be spending a lot of time at the Hitachi data center.
It's not far from the Minami-sunamachi subway station, just three
stops on the same line that serves this hotel's neighborhood.  There
are several different kinds of subways, and I haven't quite figured
them out yet.  The Tozai line seems to have 2 kinds: rapid and
regular.  I found out today that if the track signs say "Rapid", it's
a rapid train.  If the track sign doesn't say anything out of the
ordinary, it's a regular.  Silly me, I was expecting it to say
something about regular or plain or some other indication that it
wasn't rapid.  Rapid trains don't stop at Minami-sunamachi, so all of
this matters.

I brought the umbrella with me back to the data center.  No one else
on the subway was carrying one.  So much for my Internet weather
forecast for chance of thundershowers.  At least I could put it back
in the umbrella stand.

Ka Yan met me outside the building, then escorted me through the
security checkin just inside the door.  We then go on the daily hunt
for a pair of slippers.  They come in two sizes.  It's a happy
surprise that the large don't fit me too badly.

They're like stereotypical housewife slippers, except that they're
vinyl instead of fuzzy cotton across the top of the foot.  They're
just a bit darker than powder blue.  An odd person now and then is
wearing some other kind of slippers, but almost everyone is wearing
these blue slippers.  They look particularly odd on a senior manager,
who, by definition, is wearing a full suit.

Ka Yan told me yesterday that it's a Japanese stereotype of good
American engineers that they don't wear ties.  (The opposite of a good
Japanese engineer.)  So I definitely shouldn't wear a tie while I'm
here.  Meiseki-san agrees: if I'm seen wearing a tie, people will
assume that I'm in sales.

After putting our slippers on in the shoe changing room, we swipe
security card #1 through the door, then into a couple hallways to the
elevator that takes us to the 3rd floor, then wave security card #2 at
two different doors that leads to the workrooms.  There are three of
them in the immediate area.  Two of them are slightly bigger than our
living room.  Seated on folding chairs at four or so tables in each of
those rooms is anywhere from 12-18 people, depending on the time of
day.  The centers of the tables are rats' nests of network cables and
power strips.

The room that Gemini works in is the size of the other two combined.
And it holds twice as many tables, chairs, and people.  Plus a single
telephone and a fax machine.  Gemini appears to have a good deal:
there are three chairs reserved at one of the tables.  I haven't had a
good excuse to walk around all of the rooms, but it seems like Gemini
has the only reserved seats.  {shrug}  Everyone else wanders in and
grabs whatever spot is convenient.

Everyone is working on laptop computers.  Everyone's chair is a bit
too low (or table too high) for Blessed Ergonomic, Stress Free
Typing.  I'm amazed that my arms haven't started screaming at me yet.
I'm doing my best to avoid re-injuring them.  Keep your fingers
crossed.

So, I'm in this room with 30 to 40 other people.  It's pretty loud a
lot of the time.  It's difficult to think most of the time, which is
weird, because thinking is what most of us are supposed to be doing
most of the time.

The break room & rest room is on the other end of the building.  In
between is a set of regularly spaced grey doors.  Each has a security
card sensor and a sign that says, "QQQ Do not enter if sign is
flickering as N2 has been discharged."  So, I guess they aren't using
Halon(tm).  In the rare glimpses that I get when someone exits one of
those doors, all I can see are rows and rows of telecom equipment.
Whatever it's doing in there, there's a lot of stuff keeping it
company.

The slippers don't necessarily fit well, and they're made of vinyl.
That doesn't make for an easy-stay-on-the-foot kind of footwear.  I
have to curl my toes pretty hard to keep them on my feet.  Many other
people settle for clomping & stomping, combined with a shuffle so that
the slipper can't go too far from your foot before the stomp or clomp.

I tried one of the boxed juice things in one of the breakroom vending
machines.  It was aloe and white grape juice.  To erase any doubt,
there are aloe stems pictured on the box.  Given the choice of
choosing something weird with English on it or something mysteriously
Japanese, I chose the aloe.  It was quite good.  It sortof tasted like
a cross between grape juice and bubble gum, in a fruity kind of way.