Driving to New York

The simple version of my Tuesday: got up at 6:00 a.m., drove to New York City, installed two servers, drove back from New York City, arriving back at 10:30. Total time to completion: 16.5 hours.

Lesson learned from Tuesday: driving down into New York City from the east side, following Hutchison River Parkway and then Rte. 278 towards Manhattan, you come to this turn in the road and, all of a sudden, Manhattan’s skyline opens up like a picture postcard in front of you. Somehow, at that exact moment, the entire position of New York City in my head changed: it ceased being a sort of exotic, removed, magical Neverland, and snapped into focus as a real place, obviously connected by road to place where I work and, from there, to the place where I live.

It’s difficult to to justice to this repositioning. But somehow spending the 5 hours on the road to drive to the city — right past New Rochelle, where Rob and Laurie Petrie lived! — rather than flying in (which is magical, exotic and removed in its own way) made New York real for me. That we then drove into the heart of Wall Street and met a real person, and did some real work, and ate a real slice of pizza, made it even more so. Wow.

Experience in the New York Internet world: starting from this recommendation from Joel Spolsky, and from there to research on pricing, network and facilities, we choose Peer1 as a new colocation facility. While only time will prove whether they match or beat their reputation, I was very impressed with their facility, their approach, and how quickly we were able to get in and out. Mike, their man on the ground in New York, is a skilled and friendly tech: other technology companies should study Mike to see what we customers want in effective, helpful front-line staff.

The Peer1 colo site is at 75 Broad St. in the solid, over-built building that was originally ITT’s headquarters in New York. It’s the kind of building that has two brass slots between the elevators with MAIL embossed on them where you can slide letters down to the basement mail room and where the freight elevators are run by full time freight elevator operators.

The install went well, we had our slice of pizza, and then we drove back through the evening traffic to Dublin, NH.

An interesting day.