Thursday, December 21, 2006

back on the air

I'll believe it when I see it
Okay, I believe it now. Wires are still down in the road at 62nd, but evidently those ones are not a prerequisite for us having power, at least so far as I can infer from the fact that we do in fact have power now. And internet. And everything else that matters.

Machines seem to have survived, so we're now back up.

Just in time for storm #2 (actually, for us, this one is looking to be Just Rain, so far [knock wood]).

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

progress report

Still no work done yet on the tree that went down at 63rd other from clearing a lane so that the traffic can get through. This is one of three sets of lines (that I know about) that are down in our neighborhood; the furthest appears to have been fixed (yesterday), or at least doesn't still have wires supporting a tree trunk dangling 6 feet off the ground above a bunch of orange cones. For the second set, they'd gotten rid of the tree back on Friday, but the wires are still flat on the road with people driving over them. Granted, I don't know for sure which wires are prerequisites for our getting power back -- there is some surprising connectivity in places -- but I'm guessing it's not a bad measure of how much has been done and how much remains.

There are still something on the order of 150,000 people without power in the Puget Sound area. November was one of the rainiest months on record, thus the soil was nice and soft, meaning the storm arrived at the worst possible time. And now, apparently They are having to rebuild everything. If you imagine that the storm explicitly targetted and destroyed every substation and transformer pole east of Seattle, you wouldn't be too far off.

In other news we're fine and the house appears to have emerged unscathed. Temperature has been threatening to go below freezing but that hasn't quite happened yet, so the pipes are intact, and hopefully the leaky toilet will keep things that way. And even though the furnace needs electricity for the blower, the gas hot water heater does not.

It could be argued that we lucked out in having our biggest tree go down six weeks ago; it was about 50 feet tall and landed in the driveway, missing the house and both of the cars -- the idea being that if it had survived until last Thursday, when the wind was coming directly from the south, it would have been blown straight into the living room (which, I'll grant, is not actually where LambdaMOO is, but this still would have been cause for some sadness...)

Current word is maybe Friday. At this point, I'll believe it when I see it.

There's also evidently another storm on the way, albeit a much smaller one, though I like to think that all of the trees that are currently inclined to go over would have already been pushed by the big storm and thus already be gone, so...

Update (3:51 pm PST): woohoo. Tree at 63rd has been cleared. The wires there still look dodgy, but one thing at a time... Wires lying in the road on Island Crest at 62nd are still there.

Monday, December 18, 2006

No news is bad news

emma (or is she chloe on lambda?) posts from her local library, "It doesn't look like it's going to be up any time really soon, as there are two major lines down within a few blocks of our house." And it's very cold with no heat, as well. Send warm thoughts to wrog and emma/chloe!

Friday, December 15, 2006

Serious power outage!

Just talked to wrog on the phone. Things are very grim in his neighborhood -- a large tree is down a block away and took out some power lines. Essentially his entire town has no power and things are worse right where he is. So, be happy if it's less than "several days".

Get a life :-)

Thursday, December 14, 2006

still windy

There have been some disturbing power flickers in the last half hour. Just so that you know.

Update (9:40pm): Looks like I called that one right. We got hit again at around 8:50. Whee.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

windy today

So we had two (2) power failures in rapid succession: 1:47pm (PST) for about 7 minutes, then things were up for 6 minutes (but no net) and then back out again at 2:00pm and stayed out for another 9 minutes. (the combined outages would most likely have toasted the UPS if we still had UPS, though, yes, I should still do something about that...)

The fun part is that after the first power failure, alberich's clock went to 9:56pm. Apparently, the BIOS is now indeed on UTC (as intended) but something in OS Land wasn't expecting that. And of course, LambdaMOO dutifully started up 8 hours in the future, though the external network was down, so nobody got a chance to get in and look at tomorrow's newspapers or anything.

Then the second power failure hit and killed it before it could checkpoint. On the 2nd reboot, the OS finally got its act together and set the clock correctly. So none of that ever happened and we dodged a small bullet, at least as far as LambdaMOO is concerned (and with UPS we'd have only gone down once and then things would have stayed confused. so see? it's good that we didn't have UPS! ...)

Admittedly, other daemons on alberich may well be confused for the rest of the day, but hopefully they'll cope (if not, then you'll be hearing yet more about this,... whee...)