39c outside today - that's 102 in real money (like most Brits I calculate cold in Centigrade and hot in Fahrenheit) and it feels very hot indeed, at least *I* feel very hot indeed. The air conditioning is cranked up in the house and for that I'm grateful.... there's nothing worse than not being able to cool down. In England nobody has air conditioning at home because it's not worth the expense of installing for a couple or three weeks per year of heat so you have to grin and bear it and suffer without sleep or coolness.
Not that I'm a huge fan of air conditioned environments, the fake chill to the air is just not the same as being naturally cool, I find it leaves my body a little confused, but it is certainly preferable to being overheated. I compensate by having the ceiling fans turning to keep the air moving around which does take the edge off the slight fakeness of the Air Con a bit.
I remember back in the 'good old days' of running UKChat from home in the UK, when the heat got too much the servers would start to seriously suffer. G had a little office with a rack of servers in it and the temperature in that room was significantly greater than the rest of the house, and if you added heat from outside too it became utterly unbearable and the CPU's would heat up and occasionally blow up. We eventually fixed this by buying (at enormous expense) a portable air conditioner to run in that room only. Of course this was only one of the trials and tribulations of hosting from home, which also included dog hairs clogging up servers and bringing down UKC, fuses blowing when someone (innocent whistle) would turn on the Iron or the Kettle and bringing down UKC, or the electric company stupidly installing one of those key meter things which we would inevitably forget to load up and cause frequent power failures until we convinced them to take the stupid thing away again. And lastly but not leastly Murphy's Law which meant the servers broke down every time we went away for the weekend or on vacation. Oh I am glad to be relieved of that responsibility!
Posted by katie at June 8, 2004 03:08 PM