Fri, 22 Dec 2006

Power is Back

Our electricity came on Thursday evening at 4 PM, making this power outage exactly 7 days long. This last week I have been living a double life. 21st century network engineer by day, but I had to set my clock back 200 years when I got home. Away from the world of electricity, multi-billion bit per second optical communication links, prepetual warmth and food and into the land of kerosene lamps, wood fires, firewood chopping, nestling pots in the coals to make tea and coffee, and pitch black nights. Temperatures plunged into the mid-twenties during the evening, making them very cold nights. Even with this low temperature, I found my garage freezer at a balmy 50-55F earlier this week. Inside this freezer was many pounds of rotting whale, caribou, and salmon. The smell is quite....interesting?

Over the last week, the line of light and dark has been progressively moving closer towards my house. The scene was always unreal. At the end of electrical service started thick, dark clouds of smog (wood fireplaces), the distant hum of what sounded like 20 lawnmowers (gas generators), and electrical wires and other damaged pieces of civilization strewn about the streets that nobody has bothered to even fix.

I was not alone either. Many people at the office, which is based on the "east side" in Bellevue, were and still are in this situation. There have been many power outages much longer than this in the history of electrical service, but I can tell you that a few days is a very, very long time for the ill prepared.

The funny part is, my wife and kids do this for fun when we go backpacking. We didn't really mind it all that much, as we were planning on going camping soon this winter anyways.

[/news] permanent link

Mon, 18 Dec 2006

Personal air purifier starts fire on aircraft

There is nothing better than fresh air, and you just can't beat a battery powered air purification device that hangs around your neck. But before you order one from your favorite catalog of the sky and jump on the next flight out of town, be careful and read instructions! Or you could just catch the plane on fire

DESCRIPTION
  CONTINENTAL AIRLINES COA1065, A BOEING 737-800 ACFT, DIVERTED TO COLORADO 
  SPRINGS DUE TO A FIRE IN THE CABIN CAUSED BY A PERSONAL BATTERY-OPERATED 
  AIR PURIFIER WHICH CAUGHT THE SEAT ON FIRE, FOUR FLIGHT ATTENDANTS AND ONE 
  PASSENGER WERE TRANSPORTED TO THE HOSPITAL FOR SMOKE INHALATION, COLORADO 
  SPRINGS, CO

[/funny] permanent link

Sat, 16 Dec 2006

Comcast Saves the Day

Three comcast vans came by earlier today and chained this item to a utility pole. They are now powering part of the comcast network with a generator they bought at lowes:

I was going to get the bolt cutters out, but i chickened out at the last minute. It would have been nice to have some heat in the house.

[/funny] permanent link

Wed, 13 Dec 2006

Doing the Mac thing

My wife's windows laptop had a complete hard drive failure. This was also in addition to an earlier battery failure (5 minute charge time) and some physical issues that involved juice and soda. It was time to go laptop shopping.

After looking at a bunch of junk low end PC's, we came across a very well priced group of MacBooks in the $1000-$1500 range with some very nice specifications and fast intel processors. Oh, they also ran OSX, which is cool too.

We decided to do something a little different and jump into a completely different platform than we were used to. We bought two and threw away our PC's. The mere value of running Windows XP in a virtual machine sandbox was good enough reason alone. So far, we haven't had to install such garbage yet as OSX meets all our needs. There was at least one close call that involved web broswer plug-ins for her online class, but that has since been resolved.

Microsoft Office for Mac is a real life saver. As far as productivity software goes, you can't beat Microsoft's line of office products. Its how business gets done. OpenOffice and its variations, as much as I love it, is a buggy, bulky piece of crap. It means well, but after my wife ran that garbage for a years time, I was almost to the point of shelling out $300 and buying the real deal. This time, we went with student edition, which includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, for something shy over $100. Nobody verified our college ID (even though its legitimate), and they even gave us *3* licenses. Since we have His and Her MacBooks, it was great to get office on both of these suckers for that price.

With Apple now on the Intel platform, I really can't come up with one good reason why someone wouldn't get a Mac.

[/gadgets] permanent link