February 12, 1998
Dear Everyone:
You may have seen in the news that we’ve been
getting a little rain out here in Sunny
California.
About three feet, so far.
At present, we’re looking to break the record for February.
Still plenty of time to add a couple more feet.
Last Tuesday, “Wilbur” and I were scheduled to
attend a one-day seminar on
Microsoft’s
Office 97. Ironically,
having moved to San Ramon in order to get closer to where I work, the
class turned out to be held in a building barely two blocks from my old
place in Concord. On the
plus side, when I got there almost an hour early (it was hard to judge
traffic with all this weather going on), I knew exactly where I could
find a morning paper and some breakfast.
“Wilbur” never arrived for the class.
He lives in the
Pittsburg
area. I found out later that
state
Highway 4, the main way into and out of Pittsburg was “flooded” that
morning. “Flooded” may have
been a bit of an understatement.
I believe “submerged” would be more accurate.
“Flooded” is when those annoying people with their 4-wheel drives
and ridiculously high tires sail smugly through two to three feet of
standing water. In the case
of Highway 4 (also known as the California
Delta Highway), even those people would have needed a periscope to
see where they were going.
Of course, there were ways of going around “Lake
Loveridge” (Loveridge being the nearest exit), if you knew the area and
back roads. Unfortunately,
too many people did know the back ways (while the others were just
completely lost) so the roads were flooded with cars, too.
After a couple of hours of inching along, “Wilbur” gave up and
went home. As for the
seminar, he didn’t miss much.
At the office, the rain hasn’t been as much a cause
for concern as the wind.
With it kicking the power lines around, we’ve been getting some pretty
big power spikes. These can
be deadly for computers. All
of our PC’s are plugged into surge protectors and that helps.
And the servers are all plugged into really big batteries called
UPS (uninterrupted power source), which also act as surge protectors.
If the power goes out, the UPS is supposed to detect the power
loss and bring the server down safely or at least, provide about three
hours of battery power until the lights come on again.
But on Thursday, the power spikes were so powerful
that they overcame one of the UPS boxes and its server (fortunately not
one that very many people use) came down three times.
We got a new UPS for the poor server; but we also decided that it
would be best to bring all the servers down for the night, just in case
we did lose power. The
warehouse is an older building and, while
its electrical system is up to code, the code doesn’t include
delicate computer equipment.
Friday morning, everything was fine.
But with another storm system expected to come in on the weekend,
and a windy one at that, we decided to notify all our users that
Versatile,
along with our other systems, would not be available all weekend.
We brought the servers down Friday afternoon and told everyone to
not plan on working any overtime that weekend.
What did that mean for me?
It meant I was practically under orders to sleep late, lie around
watching TV all day Saturday and go shopping with “Jeannie” on Sunday.
Not to mention getting a lot of cleaning, laundry and filing
done. After all, I had to
set a good example for the others, didn’t I?
So far this week, has been drier than last, but I
can always hope for another wet weekend, can’t I?
Love, as always,
Pete
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