Well, today my telecommuting was utterly disrupted by a big ol’ blackout!
Suddenly, wham! no power.
This bummed me out. Called Southern California Edison. Reported it. Reset the breakers, nothing. Met another of my neighbors, who was trying to get word via the radio in his car.
Weather is cloudy, and it’s warm. about 90, and humid.
So I call my supervisor, let him know, he says I can come to his place (which is close). He’s in Thousand Oaks and unaffected by the outage.
Then, power comes back up. I don’t have to go! I start up my computers. Thank goodness. Just finish Scandisk on the PC, and wham, out again. Okay, so I have to go.
I disable the automatic garage door opener, start the truck, back up out onto the driveway, get out and close the garage door manually, and I’m on my way.
I open the iBook and turn on MacStumbler on the way there, only find 2 WAPs on on the way over there. This is a pretty good indicator that there’s no power in the neighborhood (Wood Ranch), that the wireless access points are not on the air.
A use for wardriving in a power outage! Is there power? Are wireless access points chirping? Not a perfect correlation, but not a bad one either.
I call SCE again and now they *are* reporting an outage for Simi Valley. Good to know.
I arrive at his place and get set up there. His WAP has WEP and won’t play nice. We get the key working, then wham, it decides to stop giving me a DHCP lease. Wha? The whole week seems to be technical glitches.
My stomach on Monday, Tuesday Leah called me from work where their fileserver was dead and I was looking up places that might sell a replacement. This morning my cell phone didn’t seem to want to ring. Oi. Then the power today, and WEP nonsense this afternoon.
The workday was shot after 3pm.
I went home, got some groceries, and as I entered the neighborhood I turned on MacStumbler again. LOTS of WAPs in the neighborhood. Yay! The power is back on.
I detruck (like… deplane!), get the groceries out, and come on in. I reenable the garage door to automatic, and check my email. now I gotta put the groceries away, but first I wanted to tell the internet what a wonderful power outage we had here in Simi Valley today.
Now, groceries need to be put away. Leah’s on her way home.
What a day.
