fine whine

Tonight was the first-ever get-together of Columbus Blogs, the beginnings of an effort to bring some of us Columbus-ites together.

As usual, I arrived fashionably late, and found the assembled few around a massive table deep in the recesses of the Arena District Max & Erma’s. On the table I spotted three laptops and a number of digital cameras (one quite nice one) and I realized I was in the right place.

For a moment I regretted not bringing one of my laptops, except for the minor facts of the dead screen backlight and wireless incompatibilities. I’d grabbed my Palm but only pulled it out once by the end of the evening. In my pocket was my new Canon Powershot A610, but that’s probably just because I like playing with it. In the end, or rather at the end, I only took one real picture anyway, and after a third of the people left. The laptops were getting pretty heavy use, though, and many a blog was visited and a post read. I have already added several of the people’s sites to my aggregator, and look forward to reading what they’ll write. I may even pop up in a blogroll or two.

We didn’t spend the whole time talking about blogs and hosting services (one of the two writers from San Francisco is the “primary tentacle” of Laughing Squid, a wildly popular hosting service that I do not use) and cheap mobile phones (apparently my prepaid three to four dollars a month represents a fantastic deal, one about which I should probably write someday), but also about life in general and work stories and many other things. Real conversations, I guess you could say, like the normal people have.

It was only later that I realized that any of us could have told the others pretty much anything, as long as we had posts to back it up. I think everybody was being honest, but this came to mind because earlier this month I considered switching my failed nano novel to one about a character who is a frequent flier and pathological liar* whose lies somehow fit into the larger plot, probably about a murder or something.

But I didn’t lie to the others, and I probably won’t write that story. I will, however, watch the Columbus Blogs site more closely and its contributors, and maybe some good, or at least some good fun, can come of all of it.

* A while ago one of my co-workers said he was a pathological liar. I honestly didn’t know if I believed him.

The lights came back on this morning sometime before the aforementioned 5a.m. target, but I’m not sure when. Jessica woke me up to point out that some of the lights were now on, ones that I’d switched on for this very moment to give us a better indication the power had returned.

I muttered something about it, and she re-set the clocks, the nine volt battery backups having long since given out. I, for my part, attempted to fall back asleep.

Today I’m tired. Tired of waking up early, tired of power outages, and tired that such a vital system has no failover or redundancy* built into it.

* Lest you think I’m misunderstanding the concept of redundancy, last night while I walked around with a lit candle, I also carried a flashlight.

I only tripped and snuffed the candle out once, but in darkness once is more than enough.

I am typing this by candlelight*, since an explosion this morning blew up two transformers at the local substation and knocked the third out of commission. Mine is but one of many thousand houses affected by this blackout, and like the others on my street, is all-electric so I am without heat or a way to cook the food that is quickly spoiling, other than to grill it.

I don’t know if Pizza Rolls can be grilled, but I may end up trying that if the power isn’t soon restored. AEP claims that the power will be restored by 5a.m. Tuesday, but that was before the torrential downpour began and darkness fell on the thirty or forty-odd trucks worth of repair and emergency workers scrambling to connect a temporary portable transformer and do whatever else needs to be done to get all of us back on line.

I’m ‘online’ at the moment courtesy of Jessica’s aging, but still functional, laptop. Its battery indicators are notoriously wrong, so I have no good way of knowing how much time remains for me to finish complaining.

What bugs me so much isn’t that the power goes out so often for so long, but that they have no better system in place to fix things or offer any sort of redundancy. Instead of being a distributed grid or net like, for example, the Internet, the power lines here seem to form more of a tree, with substations for branches, four-house transformers for twigs and individual houses for the leaves.

Last year we learned what happens when one of the smaller transformers gets knocked out, especially on a day when a whole bunch of them go offline. People freeze. If not for kind-hearted friends and their heated house, we’d've gotten frostbite for Christmas and frozen quite readily last year. I doubt the outage will last as long this year, but it seems that the power companies are constantly encountering ‘once-in-a-’ whatever sort of situations.

Either they’re just bad at contingency planning or I’m too picky about being powerless.

It’s annoying that I really have few alternatives. We have a decent number of candles ready, and a grill for cooking, and even a flashlight or two, but I’d rather not just get by in this situation. I want my standard of living back.

Do I need a generator? If the battery holds out I think I’ll add some to my wishlist for any of you last-minute holiday shoppers.

* Well, I suppose the laptop backlight is giving me some light for typing, but “typing by backlight” just doesn’t have the same ring as “candlelight” nor does it convey the ass-backwardness of the situation or my frustration nearly as clearly.

Tonight I watched Walking tall, part II. Let me tell you, having grown up a fan of Hazzard county’s good ol’ boys (never meanin’ no harm), cheering for the cops in a car chase instead of the moonshine runners feels odd, if not downright wrong.

I do, in fact, still exist, and I haven’t completely abandoned this site. For some reason I just haven’t felt like writing lately, which does not portend well for my Nano novel.

On another note, I bought a nice new digital camera, an early Christmas present of sorts. It’s a Canon A610, and I’m happy to find that gphoto is able to grab pictures off of it even though it doesn’t directly support that exact model. Now I just need to wait for the knockoff lens adapters to appear on eBay.