No power, no email

[rsc]

I don't normally watch TV news, so often when interesting things happen I find out about it in the next day's paper or glean it from things said in my favorite newsgroups. But the Red Sox had a late-afternoon game today (well, it was late afternoon here, anyway), and while flipping channels between innings we happened on a news broadcast about the big power outage in NYC and other places affected by the Niagara grid. Looks like a right mess, although they sounded optimistic about getting things back online in reasonably short order. However, I didn't make the connection (um, well, whatever) until I had tried three times without success to get a shell window from Panix (which, for those of you who don't know, is based in NYC). So I'm without email access for the moment. Yes, this is a whole lot better than being without lights or air-conditioning or any means of getting home, but I'm vexed nonetheless.

Best wishes to everyone in New York, Cleveland, Toronto, Ottawa, and other affected places (not that any of you are likely to see this until the power is back).

Comments

[jss]

(not that any of you are likely to see this until the power is back)

Well, it depends also on how geeky they are. Some folks use (large-ish) uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) for their computing and networking infrastructure. For example, though not directly affected by this, my cable modem, firewall, network hub, and wireless base station are all on one of the UPSes here, and the (wireless) laptop has charged batteries. (Yes, I'm a geek. I admit it wholeheartedly.)

The ubergeeky may well have (a) their required equipment on UPS, (b) enough battery backup to be up over 4 hours after power failed, and (c) an ISP with sufficient UPS/generator capacity to have survived the power grid collapse.

All that said, you're probably right and they won't see it 'til they're back on the rebooted grid.