March of the Penguins

Storm over the Strait of Juan de Fuca

Winter storm over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, north of Sequim, Washington. This photo has not a thing to do with March of the Penguins. Photo © Lawrence I. Charters

It was a time of drastic and disruptive climate change, full of Angst and Pathos and other characters from a Dumas novel. It was a story that had to be told.

Once upon a time, I had an office. I'd been in the office for a decade. Every single person on my floor — almost 90 people — moved at some point, but I stayed in place. I was running a complex system of computers doing all manner of strange things, from running an Internet news service to a DNS server to a steaming video server to a file transfer server to an electronic mail server to dozens of websites. I had six network ports cabled into my office. I did not want to move.

But one day, I had to move. The walls were literally going to be knocked down around me, and this seemed somewhat dangerous, making moving a reasonable alternative. I picked a weekend, and during that weekend, I also spent hours and hours patching servers. "Patching servers" is a seemingly innocent phrase that means "short bursts of panic when you do something wrong or fear you've done something wrong" interspersed by literally hours of waiting for things to finish doing whatever you've told them to do. I could explain it, but it involves math, computer programming, policies and directives, and incomplete documentation. You wouldn't like the explanation.

I decided to put the time spent waiting to good use: I made a movie of the move, Janvier des Manchots, which for some reason is better known as March of the Penguins (MP4, 29 MB).