Powerless

Well, that was a nice little test of my battery backups. Apparently, there was an accident in Oklahoma City that caused a significant power outage for parts of OKC and surronding areas, including parts of Del City. The outage lasted about an hour and forty minutes. I long ago learned that it was a good idea to have the OG&E outage reporting phone number on my cell phone, so I made use of that almost immediately after the power went out.

It was a late night for me, I was wrapping up, about to go to bed when (insert sound of many electronic devices powering down at once here). Fortunately, I have a UPS on my main PC/monitor that kept me up for another six minutes, allowing me to save stuff that was in progress. I didn't shut down though as I wanted to actually see the UPS software auto-shutdown my PC, and it seemed to work well (I even didn't save one thing on purpose and the software did it for me). I also have another UPS powering my infrastructure devices (network switches, DSL modem, firewalls, etc) so even though the entire block was without power, I could still surf the net. Ha! (How sad is that?)

I let the second UPS die on its own as well to see how long it would last, and it made it 45 minutes. Were I really desperate for more net time I could have gotten my laptop out after my main PC died and continued to work for awhile.


You'd think I'd then go to sleep, but I had this paranoid thought as the recent near-victim of a residential crime, that this moment would be the perfect opportunity for an alert criminal (at 3am?) to return and finish the job. So I stayed up until the power returned, brought my systems back online, and here I am. Now, I may regret that decission when I'm getting up for work in two hours, but I know if I were the criminal type, and I noticed a major power outage (aka burgler alarm disabler) like that, I would have immediately hit the streets and "got to work". But maybe that's just me and my paranoid information security administrator self getting all wacky on the junk.

All I know for sure is that I'm freakin tired. And hungry. But that will have to wait.