Dance This Mess Around, via Andrea leads to

Camel Walk, by Southern Culture on the Skids

SCOTS is one of the great one-album wonders of the world. Clearly inspired at least in part by the B-52s, they were grittier and way more South than Fred and the girls. Camel Walk had a brief stint at the top of the Ironic Hipster charts, but most of them never heard the rest of the album, and they were poorer for it. Eight-Piece Box is genius double-entendre, Skullbucket is awesome surf music, Whole Lotta Things is a nice bouncy sing-a-long that makes me grin big, and Soul City is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the few perfect party songs. Dirt Track Date is damn near a perfect album. Too bad they never really followed up, or too bad I never really kept following.

Oh, hey, look — two new albums. Nyuk, nyuk.

Damn, this is lame, talking about music like I know what I’m doing, but I do sincerely love this stuff. OK, I got work to do before putting on my jammies.

Nick Carr describes the new datacenter paradigm as a trailer park. Well, in the most pedantic meaning of the two words, he’s right.

Grab a ratty lawnchair and put a case of Busch cans in the cooler because the data center has now officially become the trailer park.

Poindexter, meet Jethro.

Both Sun and Rackable introduced supercomputers-in-shipping-containers some time ago, but it’s a move by Microsoft that pushes the trend into the mainstream. In its mammoth new data center in Chicago, reports Rich Miller, “Microsoft will forego a traditional raised-floor environment … and will instead fill one floor of the huge facility with up to 220 shipping containers packed with servers.” The “bold move,” says Miller, “is an affirmation of the potential for containers to address the most pressing power, cooling and capacity utilization challenges facing data center operators.” In designing the Chicago facility, Microsoft consulted with parking lot operators to ensure that semitrucks would be able to drive into the center and drop off the containers.

I do sincerely love the massiveness of this endeavour. All the web punks running around today laughed at us centralized datacenter mainframe dinosaurs, but please, tell me, how in the heck is this any different? Raised floor or not, the cooling required has simply got to be far beyond the range as the big mainframe farms where I baled hay (SYSOUT=$, anyone?) and wrangled multitudinous JES2 and SMF exits into MVS distributions and then herded them all over the range.

Big iron rules again, bitches. It always were so, and it always will be so. More so, in fact. You don’t think there’s really a cloud of social circle-jerk networks out there floating above the floor, weightless, do you? Hell, no — they gotta have datacenter they drive damn 18-wheelers into. Almost makes me wish I was back there still doing it.

Massive Oil Deposit Could Increase US reserves by 10x

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.
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The US imported about 14 million barrels of Oil per day in 2007 , which means US consumers sent about $340 Billion Dollars over seas building palaces in Dubai and propping up unfriendly regimes around the World, if 200 billion barrels of oil at $90 a barrel are recovered in the high plains the added wealth to the US economy would be $18 Trillion Dollars which would go a long way in stabilizing the US trade deficit and could cut the cost of oil in half in the long run.

Made possible, of course, by Evil Oil Men from Texas who invented horizontal drilling.

UPDATE: Via Charles Austin…doh.