The feeling of power?

There was a brief power glitch this morning; the Bay Area is in the middle of what's predicted to be a three- or four-day storm. UPSs carried the household servers and my workstation through it with no problems, but I need to make sure the kids have UPSs. The recording box is on a UPS but seems to have croaked anyway -- I see a trip to Fry's in my immediate future.

The chumby simply turned off and had to be restarted using its power button, making it clearly unsuitable for use as an alarm clock (though there's almost certainly an auto-restart hardware hack for it). I need a UPS for the CPAP, too. Last thing I need is to wake up in the middle of the night with a dead facehugger gripping my nose.

Oddly, I've noticed that some (all?) LCD monitors turn themselves on after a power glitch even if they'd been turned off.

10:00 Terrific. The most recent power glitch seems to have knocked out my DSL connection. The old connection, which I never got around to getting rid of (because I'm still using it for email), is still working, but it's slow and just barely usable. Knew I should have bought into the Meraki mesh network...

11:20 Dumb bear. The recording box died because it was plugged into the surge protector side of the UPS, not the "surge protector + battery" side. Figures. There was stuff blocking my view of the labels, but still...

Life in the s...l...o...w lane

One of this morning's power glitches took out the DSL line. Grumble. The "line" light is green, but there's nobody home. The phone works, though. I put in a call to Sonic; they tested the line, didn't see the modem, and said they'd put in a call to AT&T; I haven't heard back. I'll try again later.

The only other thing I can think of is that the power surge somehow damaged the modem in some subtle way. I'll ask whether it's worth my while to buy another modem tomorrow, not that I relish the though of going out in the storm again.

The power glitches this morning convinced me that today would be a good day to take advantage of the $30 mail-in rebate on a 1500VA APC UPS that Fry's was advertising. The drive, while not as harrowing as it could have been, was still pretty bad; I ran into two non-functional traffic lights.

I scored the last of the advertised UPS in the store. Good timing. It will replace the two UPSs currently in the server rack (a 500 and a 650) and add some additional features (it has an LCD display) and better monitoring. It can also be muted -- I'll have to look for a similar one for the bedroom; it'd be good to have something quiet next to the bed for my facehugger. In the meantime I can mute the 500VA unit that's currently in the rack.

( As long as I have the servers powered down tomorrow... )

This is not what I'd planned to be doing this weekend.