One of our long time employees, Dwayne St. John had a birthday today.

Check out the cake:

Now THATS dedication!  Happy Birthday Dwayne!

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Edit: The cake below was sent as a gift to our marketing director Chad for Christmas!

Being a nerd has it perks, Nerds can pickup mad chicks in Second Life, Photoshop acne out of pictures, and if they’re truly 1337, even have a real life girlfriend one day. I know being a nerd sounds glamorous and all, but there are a few major drawbacks. When you’re a nerd, you usually develop a serious case of Big Bonedinitis.

In college, everyone talks about the Freshmen 15, but here at the Gator, we have what’s known as the Hatchling 40. If you come to work at the Gator, it’s usually not a question of whether or not you will gain weight, but instead a question of how much weight you’ll gain and if you’ll ever stop gaining weight. The more Linux you learn, the more weight you’re going to end up packing on.

Big Bonedinitis is no joke. It’s a real disease that destroys lives and is hitting us nerds especially hard. In fact, one of our biggest expenses here at the Gator is replacing furniture that Big Bonedinitis leaves behind in its wake. We’ve broken over 40 leather chairs in the last year alone. We go through so many chairs we now have a room designated as the chair graveyard.

A few of our wall-mounted toilets have even broken off the wall forcing us to reinforce the remaining with stacked bricks. We’ve gone through so many benches that we finally decided to upgrade to a custom built concrete bench reinforced with re-bar. …

I’m sure you might be expecting a USB drive made of Gold with inlay diamonds sparkling away, but all that glitters isn’t gold, and as a matter of fact, you won’t find anything at all that is absolutely stunning. We merely want to show you what you could expect if you were to lay down about 500 big ones for Google advertising. We received the annual gift from Google and just wanted to show you what its all about.

The presentation was nice and Google does a good job of customizing their gifts while incorporating a touch of advertising. The video below shows us opening the gift, and you can see by our excitement that when you get something from Google, it’s special. This is the video of what we like to call the $500,000 Google USB Drive.

You choose where it goes

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Very rarely is a peep heard from our Toronto Office, the dedicated team of Administrators in Toronto usually keep their nose to the grind-stone and help keep our servers running in tip-top shape. They may keep to themselves, however their efforts certainly do not go un-noticed. Much to this point, they recently received an amazing gift from a very satisfied client.

Late, on a recent Saturday evening, the Toronto Technical Staff were shutting down their computers and preparing to call it a night when they received an urgent message from one of the Chat Techs at the Houston office. It seems that one of our client’s dedicated servers had taken a turn for the worse and crashed due to a mysterious software misconfiguration. The Chat Tech looked high and low for an available administrator to help our frantic client, but no admins were free to assist with the immediate issue. The Toronto Technical Staff gladly dropped what they were doing, canceled their plans for the evening and continued to burn the proverbial “Midnight Oil” until they had resolved the issue and restored the server to its original state.

“Every minute my site is off line… “, the client told us, “I lose, potentially, hundreds of prospective customers, and that just won’t do!”

The Toronto Team understands the needs of high availability websites and were glad to do everything they can to get this customers site back online in a timely fashion.

As a reward for their efforts, the client purchased tickets to a Toronto Raptors game on January 9, 2008 for the entire staff.

When asked what they thought of the tickets, the Toronto Staff said they were very grateful for the gift, but they had done nothing heroic and, in fact, what they had done was “all in a day’s work”.

Below is a snapshot of our staff in Toronto, and we’ll be sure to follow up with pictures of the game!

Pictured from left to right: Adrian P, Dave C, James N, Michael Y