Hot.
It's hot here. I managed to escape the last heat wave by running off to Seattle, but this time I'm stuck in New York. Today made it up to 95 (which wasn't bad, considering it was forecast to hit 100) and tomorrow's forecast for around 100 again.
And so what did I do this evening, and what am I doing tomorrow? I'm playing softball. They scheduled our last two games of the season for today and tomorrow. We barely have enough people to avoid forfeiting, so I don't really have much choice but to play. (If we forfeit now, we hurt our chances of getting back into a league for next year.) Sure, it's kind of fun, but getting beaten soundly two days in a row (because that's what will happen--our league this year is well above our abilities) in 95-degree heat is a bit much.
I've also been having power issues on and off all evening. I can understand power outages like the one in Queens that lasted over a week. They overload the equipment, the equipment blows up, and then they have to fix it. I'm sure it's really painful to be involved in it, but fundamentally the system is just broken and it takes time to get it running again. It's an exceptional case.
Brownouts and flaky power bother me more. Tonight, for example, my lights were noticably dimmer than usual. When I turned on another lamp, my little mini-UPS started beeping at me, even though the lights were all still on. Everything was just getting a little less power than it wanted.
Later, I completely lost power for about 5 seconds. Well, sort of. My flourescent desk lamp kept glowing a bit. And my computer (not actually plugged into the UPS, because it draws too much power when it turns on) stayed on for a couple seconds before it cut off too. And then it all just came back. Presumably, something somewhere in the system broke and failed over... but why can't they make it to fail over right before people lose power, instead of right after?
Ah well. Maybe once I finish fixing all of my bugs (not to mention failover procedures) at work, I can move on to fixing the rest of the world's bugs. Yeah.
posted by John @ 00:28
2 comments
2 Comments:
We explained the phrase "brownout" to one of the Chileans in our department yesterday. He was taken aback that they are common enough that we have a word for them ...
James and I have been lucky so far (they keep predicting power outages and so far we've kept ours). Two weeks ago, the last time it hit 95 here, we stopped at Star on the way home because we were out of milk. We were walking home and turning onto our street when I noticed that the street lights were out (an all-too-common occurance on our street, so nothing much to worry about in particular). Then James pointed out that no, ALL the lights were out. And we had just bought milk. As we got closer to our end of the street, I noticed that there were lights on and he said that they were on Ceder St., but luckily we're very close to that end of the street and so we had power and the house across the street had power, but that was it.
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