More "Oldest Living Blogger"... 'n stuff.

I was just prying myself loose from old computer about nine last evening, when the power went off. Luckily, both PCs were off by then, so they wouldn't be hurt by any possible surges or drags if things flickered and failed to return properly.
And that's what happened, too. Parts of the neighborhood are still in the dark as
I write this at twenty to four of a Friday morning.

I enjoy things like this. Why? Because it's no longer me who has to go out on stormy nights to fix the problem. And today's fixer-uppers aren't nearly as quick to get with it as we usually were. Maybe they have nicer bosses these days, or maybe this is Hydro's way of helping conserve electricity. I don't know for sure.

After lighting a few candles, and thinking how cosy and romantic it was, I was standing at the window, basking in the glow of reflected light from the clouds above the rest of the city, when suddenly, our whole neighborhood lit up again, like the proverbial Christmas Tree. Impressive! But not for long. Before I could turn away from the window, the lights flickered once and went out again. And as the neighborhood once more was plunged into darkness, and my eyes are again adjusting to it, I saw three brilliant blue flashes of light off in the distance, among a stand of trees across the freeway, near the river. Those were spaced about the right number of seconds apart to have been the three attempts usually made by a feeder circuit's automatic reclosers, trying to re-energize a line that is in trouble. And the trees in that area were likely the problem, because we had a wind storm last evening. It's still dying down as I write this.

The wind and the power outage made me recall a hurricane-force wind storm we had here on December 15th, 2006, almost eight years to the day from this less-intense blow last evening. During that one, trees and their branches were contacting power lines all over the neighborhood, making a very scary light show from my vantage point 16 floors above all that. There were many of those brilliant blue flashes, accompanied by deep-noted 'growling' noises during those arcs to ground from the lines. Our power was off for nearly a week that time. So, comparatively speaking, this isn't nearly as bad. But I'm hearing the emergency generator running at the condo complex across the back street, and someone's using a chainsaw in another stand of trees to the west of here, in West Vancouver, and apparently they haven't yet found the spot where those blue flashes I saw earlier were coming from. There's a power line running along beside a hiking trail that follows the west side of the Capilano River up through that forested area toward the Salmon Hatchery, and since you can't drive easily to a lot of that, our pampered Patrolman probably hasn't got to it yet. He didn't do the lines along our back street last evening until we'd been in the dark for about an hour and a half, and that, as we used to say, just isn't "Performance".

Speaking of "Performance", here's what we get from Mission Control of PC-BSD when we're plugged in and needing an update.... after it labors a while for you...

And they promise to completely update your operating system quarterly, with a whole new release. And where did Microsoft get the idea for "fast" and "slow" issuances of test betas? Likely from these guys, because they've been using much the same sort of arrangement for a while now, depending on whether you want reliability or would rather live on the edge with quirky new features. Two separate schemes for updating your system, as you've chosen for it. And when these updates come along, I don't have to move a muscle. I can just sit back and watch, as they roll in as downloads, and then are automatically installed, followed by the word "done" after each new entry on the list. I think this is probably the future of operating systems. The idea that "it just works".

"Performance" Part Two...

I must be getting old. I can re-install an operating system or re-format a hard-drive and have things running again quite quickly, but when there's a power outage that kills the VCR and TV and the fancy digital answering-machine phone, I have to dig into a big plastic bag full of User Manuals to "Read The Directions" for all that. I wonder why they couldn't make all that automatic? If we can idiot-proof things like cars or, microwave ovens, why not VCRs, TVs, and answering-machine phones?  Am I just hard to please? Or do I have too much stuff? (Survey says: "Yes" and "Yes")