18 thoughts on “How you know the power is going to be out for a while”

    1. Umm, I have a small chain (3 car batteries, and a seperate smaller chain of gel cells) of 12V, on constant charge maintainance, in the back room. This is a smaller chain than the one that kept me online for 18 hours into the huge power outage in '03. I plan on supplimenting this with a gas generator in the future months.

      Besides, not my house.

      Thirdly, it was posted from my camera phone, and was supposed to be in my journal yesterday evening when I took it, and it broke because I changed my LJ password 2-3 days ago and forgot to fix it at flickr. It was posted without a computer or power, but didn't make it into my journal.

      1. heh…oops…forgot about camera phone posting, my bad πŸ˜› I'm so far behind in tech anymore.

        As for the batteries..now I have all the info I need to shut you down! HAHAHHAHAH!!! Ok, yeah..lame, I know πŸ˜›

          1. the other end of DSL equipment (unlike cablemodem gear) runs off telco battery, and generator at the phone company.

            Power the modem, a laptop, and a florescent lamp, and you have all the creature comforts.

          2. odd…I seem to remember land lines being down at the time. Then again, I was drunk a majority of the time as well, so I really don't remember much, lol.

          3. 99% of calls could not go through due to trunk blocking (and obviously, cordless phones don't work in a power outage, you need real, honest to god, landline phones), but the phones were definitely up.

      2. hey paul, how did you get Flickr to update your LJ? I've been messing with the LJ pics server and have some reservations about it, especially since it changes the filenames of my images.. and does not retain the suffix (it gets spewed as a binary representation)…

        Mind if I add you as a friend here? Byxbe knows me as "Jimmy Jam"… (my old school friends call me Jim)..

        Anyways… just curious about the Flickr – LJ link..
        -bjs

        1. Jim Servin? I remember your name from /etc/passwd on workbench.

          Feel free to add me as a friend. I'll do likewise.

          Flickr has an option of "blog this" above a picture when you are in the picture details page. If you have none set, there will be a link to add a blog. Choose livejournal type, and the rest should be fairly obvious.

          The cameraphone direct to livejournal setup is via their email post option, they give two email addresses, one that lets you just upload, and one that uploads and posts to the default blog, with a specific tag (mine's cameraphone, they recommend "moblog" which I think is less intuitive)

          1. Yep.. that's me.. I used to take care of Thom's systems back in the day.. I was the one that setup the MSP firewall in 96'.. that was an interesting project.. amongst the many that were done that year.. πŸ™‚

            Thanks for the info on Flickr.. I'll have to look for that.

            -bjs

          2. I do all kinds of crazy things to abuse perl these days.

            That script is how we caught that hacker when I took over running the machine. Getting a non-exploited /bin/login was a bastard of a time. Once we found we could get gcc from sunfreeware, that box got a lot of software upgrades all a sudden. πŸ™‚

            It stayed up until Michael Paull didn't have anywhere to colocate it for a period of time. I took it over and eventually moved it onto a Sparcstation 5, which was seized when I got raided, and then it now lives on as a virtual host on one of Michael's boxes.

          3. I got fired from Netrex for taking a call from Thom about a hacker on that box… I was pretty pissed at Netrex that day because it was not a conflict of interest, but whatever.. that is one of those 20/20 hindsights because I wish I had kept my mouth shut walking out the door that way with my escorts, rather than burning my bridges there like I did.. but oh well.

            I had a bunch of cool things from sunfreeware on that machine… some in production, some in development/tweaking…

            I had a mountain of killer scripts that were put together in one way or another for that machine.. man that was a long time ago… if only we had thought of a blog at that time.. there would have been some interesting entries.. πŸ™‚

            hopefully uncle sam returns the "Evidence" in a functional order… I have heard some not too nice things about items that have been confiscated and being returned in a less than desirable condition (and unfortunately, apparently there is nothing you can do about it in terms of retrobution, even if it was a fraudulent investigation or other miscarriage of justice)..

            -bjs

          4. wow. we rebuilt the machine in '01 because the current one had a failing hard disk. Rather than transfer it from OTC, where it stayed until '01, we deployed another SS10 with better disks and memory, and migrated everything over to it. My friend adam, who paid for the new box, took the old one in exchange. When he got it home, the drive didn't spin up, and hadn't since. It apparently was making "funny noises" since January of 2000. When I heard that, I moved the reboot and shutdown commands where Thom couldn't find them (he absolutely loved to just reboot the machine any time he made a change, rather than restart the daemon. Vaxen, my children, just don't belong some places). The machine stayed up for 410 days while we arranged new hosting and rebuilt and migrated the machine.

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