Thursday, August 27th
E flew to Florida today to visit her cousin R, whose health is poor. Her plane left from Eugene at 5:20 am, so we had to get up in the wee hours in order to get her to the airport. After a long day of travel she arrived in Fort Lauderdale, rented a car and made her way to a hotel in Coconut Creek. R and E grew up near each other in the area around Ballston Spa, NY. She and her brother J are R’s closest living relatives.
Friday, August 28th
E made her first visit to cousin R today. R has ongoing mobility issues but continues to live in his long-time home, supported by a team of caregivers. Eve reports that R is physically weak but alert and that the two of them had a good talk. She will visit again tomorrow.
M drove east today and settled into a cabin at Prineville Reservoir State Park. There have been three large wildfires burning in Central Oregon and while it seems like they are being contained, some air quality warnings were still in effect. As M neared Prineville, he noticed a bit of smoky haze in the air. It shows up in this picture he took in the evening.
Saturday, August 29th
When M got up this morning, the weather was overcast and cool. The air was fresh and clear with no trace of smoke. Nice! M saw no need to check the air quality; cell service was iffy anyway. After breakfast he set off to find his planned hiking trail. The trailhead was about 30 miles away via normal roads. But while he was still back in Corvallis M had opened up his OnX app and found a back route that was only 20 miles. He had saved it on his phone. So smart. Except, as it turned out, the route that OnX had suggested included a long stretch that was not actually open for public access. So the whole thing turned out to be 35 miles. Humph. Anyway, he did finally reach the Chimney Rock Trailhead and set off upward.
After getting back at his cabin in Prineville Reservoir State Park–30 miles, no shortcuts–M walked down to a fishing dock before dinner. The water level was low, but the views were tranquil and the campground was quiet. A pair of raptors bobbed and circled above. M’s phone, which did not have a good connection in the cabin, started working fine down there in the open by the lake. He talked to E, who had had another good visit with R. She is a little worried about his living situation, as he does not always cooperate with his caregivers. It’s raining there and E is noticing that Florida is wonderfully lush and green, or, to put it more accurately, she is noticing that this part of Florida would be lovely if it were not developed to within an inch of its life and if it were not quite so utterly dominated by the automobile. She managed to find a tiny arboretum where she took the photo below.
Sunday, August 30th
Despite being tortured by leg cramps in the night, M got up reasonably early today and got on the road back to Corvallis by eight-ish. From the campground he drove 15 miles back into town, then turned left onto 1st Street, which is also Highway 126. It was important to make this turn correctly because 126 would take him first to Redmond and then to Sisters, where there is a bakery of great renown.
As Hwy 126 leaves the downtown area of Prineville, it climbs steeply up onto the high ground that overlooks the city. Here’s a picture looking west from a viewpoint that shows the highway as it nears the top. The downtown and residential parts of Prineville are behind the photographer and far below. Up on this level there are a lot of very big white buildings. You can see one of them in the photo. You can’t see all of it because there’s another building in front of it on the far right. Trust us though, it’s a big building. The total interior size is over 440,000 square feet. The name of the building is Meta Prineville Data Center Building No. 5. Presumably, both floors are jammed with endless racks of servers. The total number of individual servers is likely to exceed one million, just in this one building.
So…uh…if that’s Building No. 5, how many total data center buildings does Meta have in Prineville? The current total is ten. Building No. 1 was completed in 2011. Continuous expansion followed. Buildings 9 and 10 were completed about five(?) years ago. All together the ten buildings provide 4.5 million square feet of space. (That may seem like a lot, but we look at it this way: it’s only 2,647 times larger than our house.) What does Meta do with all those computers? According to the web page of the AI Data Center Index: “The facility runs Meta’s AI recommendation infrastructure for Facebook and Instagram’s feed ranking, content moderation models, and ad targeting algorithms.” But is the AI Data Center Index a trustworthy source? Well, it appears that the AI Data Center Index is actually produced by an AI. So it should know what it’s talking about. Unless it doesn’t.
Lately there has been growing resistance to the building of new data centers around the U.S. In 2011, however, Crook County authorities were very happy to have Facebook come to their town. Like many other places back then, the people of Prineville were willing to exempt data centers from property taxes in return for the creation of new jobs. Whether that was a smart bargain can be debated, and it is unlikely that today’s Crook County authorities would be quite so generous. There is no denying, however, that jobs were created and that the town appears more prosperous now that it did back then. Interestingly, in the case of Prineville, the property tax exemption was set to expire after fifteen years. This means that Meta’s Prineville Data Center Building No. 1, built in 2011, will lose its tax exemption this year. Hmm. We wonder how that’s going to work out.
Apple also has a data center in Prineville. Its center only has three buildings, but they’re really big and provide a total of 3.2 million square feet of space. This makes it Apple’s largest data center in the U.S. What does Apple do there? Here’s what the AIDC has to say about that: “The facility hosts Apple’s iCloud services (Photos, Notes, iMessage backups), App Store infrastructure, and increasingly the Private Cloud Compute infrastructure that powers Apple Intelligence.”
Here’s what all this looks like from above. This map shows the town of Prineville on the right and the data center area on the left. The ten Meta buildings are the ones in the triangular area between Hwy 126 and Hwy 370. Apple’s three buildings are the ones directly below the green marker for the Ochoco Wayside.
Back in Florida, meanwhile, E made another visit to R and baked him a raspberry cobbler. Whether he will be able to eat much of it is not clear, but he loved just smelling it. E will be flying back to Oregon tomorrow.
Monday, August 31st
E arrived home safely to the Eugene airport, where she was happy to find M waiting for her.
Wednesday, September 2nd
E has brought the rain back with her from Florida. But she forgot to bring the warm Florida temperatures. It’s cold here. That didn’t stop E from joining her walking group this morning for their usual stroll at Bald Hill. What she found today was that the newts were out.
