Good things and bad things

The power failure was a mixed blessing I suppose. The office was closed all of Friday, which was both a good and a bad thing. I had a whole day off, but not in a voluntary sort of way. I got a stack of dishes done and did some puttering around the house, but I spent a lot of time wondering if I’d managed to shut the server down safely.

You see, there’s a bit of a problem with our office UPS system. Not with the power backup itself, but with what it’s hooked to. Or rather what it’s not hooked to. I could keep on saying things and correcting myself for quite a while here. Anyway, the server and the huge RAID array are set up fine, as is the tape backup drive, but there’s no monitor on the UPS. When the power went out, I had to shut things down blind.

I hung out at work until five, expecting the power to come back on at any minute… I’d been under the impression that the hospital had full backup power for all areas. We’d gotten our UPS systems because of some one or two second interruptions that had happened. We weren’t expecting a full blackout.

My Fiancee and I drove over to visit Dirge and Shar on the way home, and we invited them over to our place for a cookout. I sliced up a turkey roast that I’d been thawing for crock pot purposes and grilled it. I also tried grilling some potatoes, but that didn’t work as well as I’d hoped… The turkey was cooked long before the potatoes were ready, and by the time the center of the ‘taters were done, the outside was a charred mess.

Friday I called my boss to see if he had power, since we didn’t. He didn’t either, so I asked him to give me a call if power came back on in his neck of the woods. We got power back at around ten on Friday morning, but I couldn’t get ahold of my boss again. I did hit on a scheme for checking to see if there was power at the office: I called the fax machine every few hours… I knew that it wouldn’t pick up if there wasn’t power.

From what I can tell, things came back on-line some time on Saturday. We went in to see if I’d shut things down correctly. So far it seems that I have… While we were there I checked the office ‘fridge… We’ve got a little cube fridge for film and such, and it’s been in need of a defrosting for a while. That seems to have taken care of itself… There was a chunk of ice the size of a VHS tape that had detached from the freezer coil that I disposed of before it could add to the wet floor. Monday, I’ll go through and chuck the rest of the contents out…