Ok, so who out there *hasn't* got power? :-)

Not actually funny really, I hope everybody is ok and gets switched back on soon. The forum has been down for ~10hrs but is up now so I guess things are happening.

I can imagine some bbs member's rigging up power systems a-la MacGyver so they can get posting here to tell us how they are doing!

Gareth

Where is the bbs hosted anyway ?

Visual route says it's hosted by Verio in NY. So that would explain why it was down for a period of time today.

- trs

Power was out in Tomkins Cove, NY until 3:13AM. Living without A/C is not fun.

No power here (west Ottawa, Canada) until at least Sunday. So the "Home Docks" link up top won't be working until then, and I'm mostly offline (except when running on batteries, like now).

Cheers

Living without A/C is not fun.

Weenie . I grew up in the Triangle in NC without A/C. I do feel for y'all, though.

We went almost a week without power one summer after Hurricane Fran came through. Now that was truly miserable. I managed to buy the second to last small generator 85 miles away: we could run a refridgerator, a fan, a couple lights and the tv (broadcast stations only - all the cable was pulled down with the power lines). I had to get up every night at 3 am to put more gas in it (and only a couple stations in town had power to pump gas). I hope to never go through anything like it again.

-jk

Yeah, that was fun. I worked downtown at the time and since the power was on there since there are no trees downtown, I worked a lot. I couldn't convince my wife to come and hang out, though, despite the fact that we had a TV there and several other families were hanging out, which means I still had to come home and sweat while sleeping and otherwise entertain her misery.

Weenie

I'll admit it. I am a weenie when it comes to air temperature. I even filled up my car with gas last night just in case I decided to sleep in it with the a/c running.

I couldn't convince my wife to come and hang out, though...

I'd have been there in a heartbeat.

I'm now in DC, so I mostly missed last winter's ice storm (I went down a few days later to help scrape my mother (still in Durham) out. She had no power for several days, and it was downright cold in her house. She lived under blankets (and had to balance the desire for warm drinks with their inevitable, very chilly, result) for most of that time.

-jk

I even filled up my car with gas last night just in case I decided to sleep in it with the a/c running.

Huh-uh: I'd be too worried about not waking up to sleep in a running car. I've read too many stories in the papers. Some people worry about spiders; I worry about colorless, odorless gasses (And I majored in chemistry once upon a time).

-jk

I planned on cracking the window.

In college I commuted and many times I would have 1-2 hours free between classes. Nearly every day I would sleep in my car with the A/C going and the windows closed. Probably not the best idea, but I turned out OK.

I had no power for the better part of a week and the best thing I could find was my mother's gas-burning fireplace.

For those of you to whom this information might be valuable, gas logs do not produce much heat, and what they do produce doesn't radiate much at all. Sleeping only a couple of feet away didn't keep me very warm at all, but it was better than nothing.

The last large major power cuts we had were in the "Great Storm" of '87. I think we were out for three or four days. It was October so it wasn't cold, and we have coal heating here anyway. (There's a good story by a local police officer here about the events of that night). Some people were out for longer, most were out for about the same time. All the damage was from trees which haven't seen winds like that for a hundred years (15 million trees were blown down that night!)

In our local area we used get several short cuts every year - usally during a thunderstorm. A few years back they spent a lot of money replacing all the copper power lines with plastic coated aluminium ones and upgraded some equipment which was *supposed* to improve reliability. It did, for a while, but in the past few years we've had a *lot* for no particular reason. We were off for four hours last week after a storm, and it's probably the fourth cut this year.

Gareth

Where I live (Suburban Maryland just outside of DC), they don't trim the branches away from the power lines. At all. I see branches growing between powerlines that are no more than 4 inches apart, and even growing around the lines themselves.

Every time we have high winds (thunderstorm, etc), the power flickers, browns, and sometimes blacks altogether, usually just long enough to kill anything not on a UPS. Very, very annoying. When I was in NC, Duke Power kept the powerlines much clearer - only hurricanes and ice storms seemed to cut power.

-jk

In reply to:

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but I turned out OK

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You sure about that
Sorry, couldn't resist.

I bet he can't remember anything he studied for that test - all of the fumes...

I, personally, grew up under high tension wires. That doesn't make me glow unless it is really, really dark out.

I do understand that the EMF from high tension wires is known to produce headaches though. Not to mention really crappy AM reception.

As I understand it, there are three major power grids in the U.S.: eastern, western, and Texas. Thankfully, everything here has been business as usual. It was fun listening to Democracy Now this morning. The way they described it, New York was a massive party last night: drummers in Union Square Park, a marching band parading through the streets of Brooklyn, ... It almost would have been fun to be there.

In reply to:

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I even filled up my car with gas last night just in case I decided to sleep in it with the a/c running.

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About a month ago, me and 100k of my closest neighbors lost power here in northern Illinois. With temperatures at 95 and no ac, we ran the Geo Metro (all 3 cylinders!) for 4 days solid, although with a slightly different use. We ran several fans, the dvd player and tv off of an inverter. It used about 3 gallons of gas every 18 hours at idle. I probably could have gotten the refrigerator goin, if only I could get to the Passat in the garage; without electricity I couldn't open the garage door.

Every opener I've ever seen has a disconnect cord or lever to separate the door from the motor so you can pull it up manually...

Not to mention really crappy AM reception.

Last night was the first time I really used AM on the empeg tuner (news in the US is commonly on AM stations). When the VFD is up to 100% brightness, the reception is pretty poor. When I turned on my headlights (causing the VFD to drop to 50%), stations came in much better. You gotta love it.

but I turned out OK

You sure about that

No.

In reply to:

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Every opener I've ever seen has a disconnect cord or lever to separate the door from the motor so you can pull it up manually...

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Of course, on the inside of the door. The regular(small) door to the garage has a deadbolt that we dont have the key for, the previous owners had lost them. Until now we didn't even think of this as a problem as we always just use the main garage door. I've since replaced the lock.

Hmmm... really? That would definitely affect my plans to purchase a tuner. If / When I ever listen to the radio, it's always AM. Anyone else have this issue?

Yep, as people found out, the server is in New York. The new servers are coming along nicely, and will be in Austin, TX, where they can be monitored better. I may start work to get the board moved this weekend if nothing else comes up.

Blackout from space:

That's pretty cool looking actually. The west coast is quite dark in comparison to the east coast. Lots of countryside around there or something?

A combination of population density (or lack of it) and terrain.

Tom: Your source for that photo? I suspect it might be faked. If you put that picture into a photo editor and increase the gamma, it looks like someone just took a black airbrush tool and sprayed over that part of the image.

mountains and desert. LOTS of desert.

Also, by 11PM EST many of those blacked-out locations had regained power.

Looks like you're right. Here's a comparison photo from Yahoo from NOAA satellites, supposedly:



Source

Yup. It was that much-more-authentic-looking photo (which I'd already seen linked from Bluesnews a couple days ago) that made me suspect Tom's posted photo was not genuine. A simple gamma adjustment of the questionable picture increased my suspicions.

Well, I have to wonder if those are accurate. Does cloud cover affect those signals? Because that image shows a faily significant difference in light in Washington DC area, which I thought was unaffected (I certainly didn't see or hear of any effects). It even appears Richmond was affected, which I'm sure wasn't the case.

Yeah, looking at it closly mysely, it does look like a photoshop job. A bad one at that. Looks like they used black, while most of the dark land elsewhere isn't pure black.

It was passed around in e-mail here, not sure of the source.

Was the power situation the cause of the little difficulty the BBS was having this afternoon?

Looks like this is what they made the picture from.

- trs

I'm surprised India isn't lit up more in that picture as heavily populated as it is. Fascinating picture, though.

- trs

Was the power situation the cause of the little difficulty the BBS was having this afternoon?

Wasn't aware of any situation today on the boards. Tuesday though, there was some minor peformance issues from a minor slashdot like effect.

Looks like this is what they made the picture from.

Funny thing is, I actually have that picture amongst my wallpaper files, and didn't realize the faked photo was a sub-section of it, even when I suspected it was faked.

I'm surprised India isn't lit up more in that picture as heavily populated as it is

A perfect example of population density != power density :-/

Wasn't aware of any situation today on the boards

I would say it was a regional thing, but speaking to Ricin, who is apparently on the west coast, I doubt it. For me the board was unreachable from around late afternoon to early evening, and prior to that (all day and for a few days preceeding), it has been very slow. This was at work and at home. But it seems fine today.

Yep, West Coast.

I too have noticed the slowdown, and the down time from yesterday. Seems OK now, though.

Same problem from Europe (Netherlands)

*bump*

How's the power grid across the pond?

No problems in New York since the initial outage.

Actually, I was referring to London...

The local radio station said that they've been without power; coincidence? Of course... it could be propaganda.

You never know on this BBS what side of the pond anyone is on.

Haven't heard of any problems over here... (other than train rails suffering from too much heat!)

Edit: damn, serves me right for posting before checking: there have been

I managed to get stuck on a train between Blackfriars and City Thameslink stations for almost an hour - they're only a couple of hundred yards apart!

I managed to get stuck on a train between Blackfriars and City Thameslink stations for almost an hour - they're only a couple of hundred yards apart!

Still not quite as frustrating as when I got stuck on a train on my way to Schiphol airport, within view of the airport. I could actually see the northwest 747 I was supposed to be on take off...