Beep!

Hey there sweaty monkeys,

[crap.crap.crap. This post was about halfway done, with links and witty commentary and a mostly interesting story, then the little iBook froze. The keyboard continued working, allowing me to issue commands, but wouldn’t accept them once entered. Wanna know what happened? The IBM-branded mouse is what happened. I had one in the bag with my work laptop (or is it “notebook?”) and thought I’d use it on the Mac. Despite the problems I’ve had with them at work I figured that it might be just fine on another platform. That wouldn’t be the first time that trick has worked and all was going well until now. BTW, that would be your IBM Model MO27FO four button optical mouse with scroll wheel manufactured by MICRO Innovations. If you could take the time to avoid them like the plague, I’d recommend that course of action—unless you dig frustration, in which case, be my guest. On second thought, not even then.]

The temperature at San Diego’s Omnipresent Charitable Organization’s Far Eastern Outpost in the hub of the grand Coachella Valley was a balmy 102 degrees this afternoon. No big deal, actually. It’s May and they’re girding for summertime highs in the high 120s, so today’s weather was fairly typical. Folks were in and out of the building. The air conditioners were humming along, as were my charges in the server room.

Then the power went out.

This has happened fairly often there despite the Imperial Irrigation District’s commitment “…to offer low-cost, reliable energy service to its local customers.” My understanding is that the low-cost part is right. Even the “local customers” part is accurate. They’ve just been struggling with the reliability part. Hell, what are they going to do when absolutely everybody has their A/C on full-tilt? I suspect they’ll offer the same reassuring words that their phone operator hoped to soother our troubled souls with today (which I’ll paraphrase); “…geez, you and 500 hundred other people, just keep ‘yer shirts on…”

Ahhh. I feel much better.

The nice thing was that the big backup batteries gave me plenty of time for an orderly shutdown of the servers and still kept the switches running. We had a connection to the rest of the network the whole time the mains were down. Sure, nobody could get to their documents and if they had a desktop workstation they were screwed, but the laptop users were hooked up and working until their batteries ran out (which only happened to one older laptop). If you ask me, it was a fairly decent test and most everything ran like we expected. I was a little concerned that the analog phones quit, but that’s another post (or not. analog phones? are you kidding? i’m bored just objecting to the idea. – ed).

There’s actual good stuff to write about. Last weekend was good fun and pointed to the eternal joy to be found by a four year old in a Big Wheel and steep driveway. But that’s later!

Your pal,

bob