Unnaturally Long Attention Span

I open my eyes to a pulsating red glow and deep sweat. I am in bed and it's 6:30 in the morning. The text message on my cell phone that has awaken me politely informs me that our machine in the server facility has gone down again. Shit. Time to reset the crawler, merge the indicies, start up the query processing backend, and reboot the web application. I jump out of bed, through clothing, and into a car. I barrel down the 2.5 mile stretch of El Camino Real that connects the Stanford campus and my office, passing by green lights and small coffee shops just waking up for the day. Burger place, gas station, internet company, burger place, internet startup, Starbucks, internet startup...

So, another day begins at the internet company I work at. After resolving a certain persistent server crisis, I head over to the company gym across the building. A short jog, 5 sets on the bench press, curls, abs, squats and I'm awake. Life is beautiful. I sit down on my black task chair in my corner office on the first floor of our Mountain View building. In front of me are two laptops, four bottles of water, two protein bars, three paper notebooks, a stack of charts and tables, and a stack of research papers. One of the laptops has a blinking console open to the NERSC supercomputing cluster at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. So much to do, so few CPU cycles..