Something odd happened. While at work I was editing a file on one of my home computers when the connection suddenly stopped responding. So I did some checking and found that both my cable and DSL connections died at 6:40pm--at least that's what my monitoring told me.
Figuring that could only mean a few things, all of them bad, I took that as my signal to head home. So I did.
As, I was driving home this evening and for the second time this week I ran into horrible traffic on Lawrence Expressway. The first time was Tuesday morning. As I got closer to home (which took forever), I realized two things. First, I was not going to be able to reach the grocery store before they closed. Second, I noticed that traffic lights were out. Apparently there was a big power outage and the radio station I was listening to didn't inform me of this. They're usually quite good about such things.
When I tried to turn onto my street from Lawrence I noticed that I couldn't. There was a very smashed up car, a fire truck, and three police cars in the way. Ah! The power outage was caused by some moron running into the pole at the end of my street.
Wonderful.
So I took the long way. I spent some time throwing out junk mail, cleaning up, and making sure I knew where the candles were. Then I decided to walk to the functioning ATM (the power was fine on the south side of Homestead Ave, but the north side was dead) to deposit several checks that I've been meaning to do something with.
Heading home from there, I noticed that power had been restored. Yeay! No spoiled food in the fridge.
I grabbed a drink of water and some yogurt and prepared to work on some stuff while a movie played as background noise. Except that 5 minutes into this little exercise, the power died again. It's still off. And it's quite dark outside, since it's 9pm.
With several candles lit and little else to do, I figured I'd write a blog entry while I still have some battery life in the laptop.
It's times like this that I wonder why the big power transformers sit on the busy road rather than a side street where they're far less prone to being attached by rouge vehicles.
Of course, I know why. But that won't make my lights come on any sooner.
Grr.
Update: At 9:30pm I got power back. But it seems that everything across the street is still dark. Hmm.
Posted by jzawodn at August 08, 2003 09:33 PM
If you run servers on your home DSL connection, this is why you need to remember to set the BIOS to boot authomatically after a power loss. It's a lot faster than running home to turn it back on. Only took me one power loss to remember that. :)
Of course, who would keep anything "critical" on a server at home?
Anyway, relying on what are typically government enforced monopolies (power companies) to care about minor details like "customers with no power", enough to take pro-active steps to avoid it, is like relying on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Sure, I guess you'll get lucky sometimes...
