The Planet Blog

April 1^st can be a crazy time around any office. The street smart crowd knows to be wary of “Free Donut” signs; thinks twice before borrowing a pen from a coworker; and answers every phone call with a veil of disbelief. It’s a conspiracy: everyone else on the planet is entitled to be crazy for the day.

Apparently, someone noticed the fear of impending doom in the eyes of a group of coworkers and decided to help them prepare for April Fools’ Day by providing an age-old tool from a conspiracy theorist’s toolbox … The tin foil hat. Apparently, the pranksters helpers ran into a problem: they didn’t have hat sizes for everyone. All hope was not lost, though. A communal hat was created over eight full cubes (with a perimeter of about 125′) to protect the inhabitants from the crazy lurking outside.

Todd and I have been accused of pranking helping from the moment we walked into the office this morning.

For good reason:

P.S. Irene has yet to retroactively grant her permission to us.

The Planet is widely recognized as an industry leader in network performance, reliability and capacity, so for our loyal customers (and soon-to-be customers), we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what makes our network great.

Terms like “Tier 1 bandwidth” and “fully redundant” are tossed around in networking circles, but to the uninformed, those terms may make about as much sense as “dual layer lunar module connections” and “space-time transfer warps.”

Have no fear, though. The video below should give you a good education on The Planet’s network, and you’ll avoid the typical Network Engineer initiation (which typically involves multiple pairs of socks and a gallon of peanut butter … I’ll spare you the details).

Stan Barber, our vice president of network operations, gave me a great network walkthrough, and because I think everyone could benefit from his tutorial, I did my best to transcribe the simplistic overview on video a la the UPS Whiteboard commercials.

Video Disclaimer: We are continuing to build our network, so the final schematic is forward-looking and will be fully realized shortly. The connections and their explanations have been simplified to best communicate a high-level understanding of the network … Oh, and I am not an actor nor a Network Engineer.

Right about now, you’re probably expecting me to say something like “The Planet: It’s the Network,” but I doubt Verizon would find that message very original.

We take a lot of pride in our hosting network, so if you have any questions, please let us know and we’ll be happy to answer them for you.

-Kevin

The YouTube link: The Planet Network

Given the phenomenal success of Todd’s “This Month in Vending” interview last week, along with his survival, we decided to post a new episode for your viewing pleasure. With this quick turnaround, we changed the name of the segment to “This Week* in Vending” with the asterisk doubling as an attention grabber for the word change … and as an excuse in case we aren’t able to keep up the pace.

In this interview, I enjoy a vending machine chili-cheese hot dog with Christian Plunkett, The Planet’s Manager of Technical Support. A new addition to the episode is the welcome music track pulled from a song performed by our very own Brandon Holbrook … Hopefully he accepts this shout-out as a substitute for the royalties an artist would typically receive.

If you’ve worked with anyone here at The Planet and you’re interested in hearing from them in a segment of “This Week* in Vending,” please let us know. If you work at The Planet and you want to embarrass one of your co-workers, feel free to nominate them as well.

-Kevin

The YouTube link: This Week in Vending: Christian Plunkett

Sometimes inspiration can come from the strangest of places. Thoreau found his muse on Walden Pond in Concord, MA. Rosa Parks helped spark the civil rights movement on a crowded bus in Montgomery, AL. The catalyst for this post was far more ordinary: the vending machine area in our Houston headquarters.

We wanted to host a series of interviews on the blog to let you meet some of the people behind the scenes here at The Planet, but we needed a hook … A subject that was both intriguing enough to capture interest and fun enough to make the series worth watching. Our first interviewee, Todd Mitchell, came up with the idea of “This Month in Vending” after I adventurously chose a florescent-colored Blue Cream Soda from our vending machines and subsequently shared the product’s ridiculousness with all of my coworkers. Upon further investigation, we found several questionable products that were begging for taste-tests. So, we plunked down some coin for a package of Riblets, and the rest is history:

-Kevin

The YouTube link: This Week in Vending: Todd Mitchell