here we go again ...

IIRC, we got 21 days of rain in May. Now, in June, that wet trend continues. Already this morning, the UPS caught a power surge as Yet Another Thunderstorm moves through the area.

Pandora waddled down the hall to inquire if she should be concerned, and I told her "probably not". Beta's crashed under my feet, as usual. I wonder if I should give her the new password, so she can blog again? Hmmm.

Yet Another Milestone

.. and then there was the article in today's newspaper about the happy people of Crawford, Texas .. now relieved that the war protestors (led by Cindy Sheehan) will no longer be coming to Crawford, interrupting their formerly-placid lives. Yeah, remembering those 3,480 dead soldiers is such an annoyance.

It seems like only yesterday, when the number of dead US soldiers from President Quagmire's Campaign For Glory passed 3,000. Now, we're only a day or two (at the current "run rate") of reaching the milestone of 3,500 dead.

A few weeks ago, I added the [US Fatalities] widgit to my laptop (running OS X) which keeps it in my mind ...

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unrelated: another power failure @ 00:34 last night (shortly after midnight, for you time-challenged readers). this one lasted all of 90 seconds.

flipping the dial

I just might give up on the local TV news completely .. every few months I get fed up with one station or another.

This time, I'm fed up with the local CBS affiliate (KTVT-11). Just in the last month or so, they've undergone some peculiar brain surgery and are now offering "breaking news" for every car crash and/or domestic violence situation within 75 miles. I'm guessing some Rocket Genius read that those sensational stories help ratings, and perhaps they do - for those who didn't do well in school (and hence grew up to be Loyal Bushies). Maybe it's Sweeps Week and they'll regain their sanity, but I'm not holding my breath.

I've now done my part by removing CBS-11 from my (TiVo) rotation and am now sampling the competition (ABC, NBC, Fox, and a couple independents). It's surely a lost cause, because none of them provide much in the way of real news - that takes too much work, and must be lost on the Great Huddled Masses.

My least favorite is the way they handle severe weather .. when a storm is within 50 miles of here, they interrupt the entire newscast and "follow the storm" until it's 50 miles out of town. Needed a news fix that night? Sorry .. can't help you.

just wait until `09

Barring more of Texas Governor PrettyHair's (in)famous Special Sessions, the Texas Legislature has concluded its work until 13 January 2009. It'll be a few more days until PrettyHair signs some legislation and vetoes others. It's a good great thing that this travesty of governance only happens biennially.

(for those of you who are Texas-edjicated, that's a Big People's Word that means "every two years")

There are several blogs that do a credible job of covering what goes on (far, far better than the local disgrace newspaper - the Dallas Managed News, which is increasingly irrelevant). Here are my Top Four picks (all have RSS feeds, thank-you-very-much):

Burnt Orange Report
Pink Dome
Texas Kaos
Texas Observer

Ones you can safely ignore: Capitol Letters and Dallas Managed News Editorial Board (a defacto mouthpiece for the SMU-inspired Loyal Bushies).

Welcome to Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn!

I guess I felt as if I'd played enough with Fedora that it was time to broaden my horizons (?) so today I removed that Linux partition and substituted another one: Ubuntu 7.04. For some reason, they feel the need to use the English Alphabet to identify their releases, so F [ Feisty Fawn] is the 6th release .. the next will probably be Goofy Grape or somesuch.

I'm entering this blog post from Ubuntu, since the installation was (mostly) trivial and it comes with the Firefox 2.0.0.3 browser (among lots of other stuff, including the OpenOffice.org suite). This PC now has Windows XP Home Edition, Solaris 10 11/06 and Ubuntu 7.04. Fortunately, the GRUB that's included correctly configured the boot menu so Instant Gratification is possible.

The first thing Ubuntu (based on Debian) did after installing and booting was (like Fedora) to search for updates - always a nice touch to know that I have the latest code available.

The more I play with Linux and Mac OS X (based on Berkeley), the more I'm convinced that I've paid my last dime to Microsoft. And yes, that's a good thing.

foo@whitebox:~$ uname -a
Linux whitebox 2.6.20-15-generic #2 SMP Sun Apr 15 07:36:31 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

springtime in Dallas

Two more power outages today - both relatively short. The first one was about 1pm and lasted 8 minutes, and the 2nd was about 4pm and lasted about 2 minutes (not even long enough for my one battery-challenged UPS to power down).

power outage #2 .. will that be all today?

I accidentally discovered the ideal way to endure a power outage: leave home.

A line of thunderstorms rolled through Dallas today; this is not unusual this time of the year. So, when the power failed soon after 4pm, I watched and listened as the UPS on my various computers dropped to battery and started beeping. Yeah, yeah .. I've been through this before many times. If I just wait a few minutes, the power will come back on and I won't have to reboot anything. And indeed, that's what happened on all but one PC, which apparently didn't have enough reserve to handle the 7 minute outage. At least the software did the right thing: a graceful shutdown.

A few hours later, the storms had mostly passed when my PDA started chirping, reminding me of a 7pm meeting. Okay, fine .. I'll go. Heck, I'll even get a free carwash since there was a wee bit of rain still falling.

So, when I returned home around 9:15 I was mildly surprised to see that my lights were out, along with my neighbor to the south. The neighbor to the north still had power, so, I moseyed inside to Go Through The Routine of calling TXU Energy Delivery and reporting the outage (it's mostly automated, based on my CallerID). The automated darlin' told me power would be restored no later than 11pm and indeed it came back up at about 9:45pm. Looks like power was out here for about 1:52.

By then, I'd made a few amazing (!) discoveries:

1) my DSL circuit was still up, since I had plugged the DSL modem-router into the UPS in a moment of brilliance -- long ago.

2) Since DSL was still up, I could use my laptop for the duration of its battery life (about 2 hours) and check email, etc. After about 15 minutes of that, the power returned.

3) I switched my home alarm to the wireless version a few months ago, and it appeared to work well .. as a nice test if someone decided to break into my home after cutting the power first. When I entered my dark home, the alarm system went off immediately (which I cancelled in the normal way). That's harder to simulate .. short of flipping my primary circuit breakers which is .. well, annoying.