July 12, 2005

Min got home just after 7:00 but didn’t come to bed until 9:00. I slept in as late as I could which was till around 2:00. The phone rang some but not nearly as much as it used to.

Miranda took off this morning before I was awake. Andy and I both ended up having tons of job hunting stuff that needed to be done so that kept us both busy for much of the afternoon. After 5:00, once things had calmed down a little bit, we drove up to Tom Wahl’s in Avon to get some dinner. Andy was in the mood for a veggie burger. Weird, I know. After dinner we went over to Woody’s II on Genesee Street to get some ice cream.

I didn’t have much time at home before I had to get ready to go back to work. Tonight is Holt Road in Webster.

As I neared the store this evening, I noticed that there were no street lights working. Then I noticed that none of the buildings in the area had any lights on. It was still decently light out so it took me a while to assure myself that there was really a black out in the area. The weather was fine so I was pretty surprised. It has been incredibly hot the last few days (New York has been in the mid to high nineties while Houston has only been in the mid eighties!) so it could have been rolling black outs but we don’t normally get anything like that up here.

I got to the store and they informed me that they had been without power for about three and a half hours already and that they had had a similar outage on Friday without any explanation as well. It took a little while before we got the go ahead for me to get to work anyway but the store does obviously have its own generator and battery systems for the server room so I expected that I would be all set. The thing that I hadn’t been counting on was how hot the server room would get in such a short period of time. One of the things that goes off with the power is the air conditioning system that keeps the servers cool. So between the heat coming off of all of the equipment in there and the incredible heat outside, the room started to climb above ninety degrees in no time. And, of course, I remembered how cold the server rooms were tonight so I wore warmer clothes even though it was so hot outside. So I was really dying in there.

The power came back on part way through the night. We had an issue, though, when the generator kicked off and the store went back over to the grid, the batteries in the server room died and took everything that I was working on down. That sucked. I lost a lot of work and ended up having to repeat an hour and a half of work.

I came home and worked at home again tonight until 5:00 am or so.

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