There are no actors in this story, only people. The people of the city of Detroit, and what happened to them, or could happen to them, on a day called X.
http://mainframe.timmins.net/gallery/power-outage
Most of these pictures were taken during the 11 hour period I was volunteering to the RACES effort in Oakland county by handling messages between Pontiac Osteopathic Hospital in Pontiac, MI and the Emergency Operations Center.
On Fri Aug 15, 22:55h, the TechApartment compound had commercial power restored.
All major systems should be up and running at this time.
Feels good in the air conditioned confines of level 3. They get mad ups for this:
$ uptime
8:56pm up 428 days, 13:55, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
The whole northeastern united states loses power, and my uptime is maintained.
Fuck, air contitioning ownz me. This whole city looks so bizarre and post-apocolyptic with the complete lack of power.
I'm incredibly disturbed that my hobbies have left me completely prepared to be able to be serving DNS from emergency power to keep my mail from bouncing.
I'm also incredibly disturbed that my DSL still works, even though the city south of us doesn't even have running water.
Lord praise Ham radio, computer ninjaness, and telco backup batteries.
Apparently my friends on IIP missed me 🙂
It seems weird to be home again, but I really enjoy it. After 2 weeks on the road (not counting the two days I was here in between and mostly slept) it's nice to be back home. Packetstream is great, but it's alot nicer to just have a permanent internet connection that is faster than 19.2 kilobaud.
I downloaded this today, and I'm pretty disturbed. http://216.167.96.120/BPL_Trial-web.mpg
Those of you who are not amateur radio operators won't understand why that video is a bad thing, but believe me, it is.
That's what happens when Broadband over Power Line works at currently legal part 15 levels, and the industry wants the FCC to allow BPL to be allowed to exceed part 15 levels. This could basically destroy amateur radio HF. I thought the ARRL was just being alarmist until I seen QRM that holds a solid S9 across the band. You can hear them trying to tune in a normal transmission, and you can barely hear it if you can tune out the noise mentally.
If that interested you, read http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2003/08/08/2/?nc=1deah6gi/4
"The BPL industry and their associations have told the FCC and the world that there is no interference potential from BPL systems," Haynie said. He noted that the American Public Power Association, in its comments to the FCC, put the burden on the technology's challengers to empirically demonstrate its interference potential.
"The video presentation does just that," Haynie said. "Anyone seeing these BPL signals for megahertz after megahertz for miles along a power line should be convinced that BPL–even operating at the present FCC limits–poses a serious threat to all HF and low-VHF communications."
Pictures of my trip to Traverse City are posted. Check them out if you're bored.
I couldn't have asked for a better 7 days than what I just experienced. I couldn't have planned a better 7 days than that. I don't really wanna get into details, but I'm really happy nonetheless.
My boss was right, I should have taken a vacation a long fucking time ago.
On my way up to Traverse City right now. This should be fun 🙂