Who Thinks About Data Centers In Alaska?

Recently, Eric Leichter took a family vacation in Sitka, Alaska and learned that connecting to the internet through his smart phone was easier than he expected and that there is a host of mobile applications to make the trip more fun.

Recently, I was fortunate to go on vacation for a week with the family. Tucked away on the island of Sitka, Alaska, it was a week full of fishing, hiking and combing the beach for sea creatures. In my mind, I was going to be farther away from technology than I had been in a long time and was a bit worried about being out of touch. Although there was no Starbucks or Chipotle, AT&T had just installed a cell tower. Even here, the World Wide Web was available to make my life better.

A few uses of the web while in a remote fishing village:


The Shralp Tide by Shralp software application (available on the iTunes App store) lets you check the tide from your phone. The kids want to see starfish, sea anemones and kelp on the beach, so you do not want to show up at high tide when they are covered up.






Marine&Lakes USA by Navionics (available on the iTunes App store) offers navigation charts on the mobile phone so you don’t get lost or run into a shallow spot. You don’t want to run the boat aground and have to swim back in 53°F water!



Fish and plant identification – Did you know that there are more than 100 types of Rockfish?








Trail maps
and monitoring of the snow – I quickly found out which trails were open and fairly clear from snow. We conquered Gavin Hill trail (3500’ elevation at the top); I was the only one to get up to my knees in snow



For the wife to fact check me when I throw out suspect information about some mountain I have climbed in the past.
Downloading a new book on my Kindle and keeping up with the Mavericks-Heat scores.


Obviously Facebook, so that everyone back home can see how much fun we are having or so that everyone back home can make fun of the “whopper” fish I kept catching .

And of course – being the dedicated employee that I am – I wouldn’t like to get too far behind on e-mail. I occasionally jumped on the network to at least keep up with what’s going on back in the real world.

Not everyone would think of data centers and networks while on their vacation; however, as we relaxed one evening after a hard day of hiking, I noticed that three of the four adults were on their smartphones.

I thought to myself that the networking business is not a bad place to be right now.