The last three days (including today) I’ve been in Amsterdam on business. Very cool city – I wasn’t looking forward to this leg of my trip, but I’m glad I got the opportunity to come here. More pictures from the trip can be found here.
While in town, I visited the Van Gogh Museum (neat), the Rijksmuseum (meh, old art), Anne Frank House (wow, talk about sobering), and just generally milled about the city. Weather was great during my time here, and I walked about 25km (9km on day 1 and 16km on day 2).
While in town, I visited the Global Switch datacenter near the airport. The most interesting thing about this facility is that it used to be an IBM Selectric Typewriter facility. It’s peculiar that as the typewriter aspects of the building went by the wayside, some enterprising individual converted the building to a datacenter. As one of my colleagues put it, “the computer replaced the typewriter not only on the desktop but also in the factory.”