Blackout
August 19, 2004
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Posted by Aubrey Turner
A storm rolled in around 6:00 this morning and killed the power in the neighborhood for about 2 hours. I had a dental appointment at 8:00am this morning and what is usually a five minute trip took 25 minutes (because of the four lights between here and there, three of them were flashing red).
But what was most annoying (aside from all the beeping from my UPSes and alarm system) was that I was trying to get a year out of my Linux system without a reboot. According to the boot logs, the previous boot was at 15:25 on Thursday, October 16, 2003 (which was when I first moved the system into this house). Damn. I barely had two months to go and I would have likely made it if not for the power failure.
Categories: Personal Life Stuff
That day was incredibly frustrating. It was the morning of my Series 7 Exam, and Price was moving at a snail’s pace because of the flashing lights. I finally turned on Rufe Snow and somehow found my way to Hurst. A twelve mile trip took an hour and 15 minutes.
On the plus side, at least my power came back relatively quickly. But in four and a half years of living in Denton, my power only went out one time for just a moment, so I hope this isn’t a regular occurrence in Keller.
I’ve been here about 10 months and this is the first major power failure. According to the logs, there were 18 events where the UPS took over. Of these, 17 were less than 5 seconds (which seems to be the logging interval), with the last one being the major one.
Going back further, there were 17 events during the 10 months before I moved, with three of those being long enough for the system to shut itself down. Given the two 10-month periods, it would seem that Keller and Denton are almost tied for number of power hits, but Denton wins the prize for more serious events.