Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Actually, I need several. *sigh* Having the power go out a couple of times a year is a pain, but ultimately something that cn be dealt with as long as no computers die as a result. But now it's been something like three days in the past month and a half that I've lost power here. This time the Debian box came back but the Windows NT machine is hosed. (It gets as far as probing the Plug-and-Pray devices then reboots from scratch, in an endless loop. If I yank the Soundblaster, it gets as far as telling me what's on the PCI bus -- the stage just after counting its RAM -- and hangs there, never accessing the hard disk.) And there went my afternoon, especially since the third time the power went out it had been on long enough to fool me into thinking it was on for good, and failed when I was two thirds of the way through running fsck on the big disk in the file server. Argh.

Even without seeing whether a lamp or space heater is on, you can tell whether the electricity is running here just by sound (unless it's during the wee hours) because automobile traffic through the intersection near my house sounds very different when the traffic signal there is dark.

I did take advantage of the downtime to swap out the big hub and replace it with the switch. But my filesystems weren't happy on restart, since I was in the middle of doing five different things at once on three different computers (not counting the file server that they were all connected to) when the power failed the first time.

Colour me frustrated and annoyed. And finally, very very tired.

Something I was about to write about hours ago, before the electricity went off, was watching pedestrians around midday. The snow on ... Friday? ... didn't seem like much, and was neither deep enough to be noteworthy nor even as much work to shovel as it looked like. It didn't even really look like it was worth the bother to shovel, being so minor. But here it is Monday, and that snow has turned to uneven ice. On my side of the street, four houses in the whole block have clear sidewalks. What makes this feel like it matters is that I was watching people negotiating the sidewalk earlier, and observing how drastically their gaits change when the step onto the clear patch in front of my house and then off it again; even the parts that look like just stale, packed snow are pretty treacherous ice. Folks'd be better off crossing to the sunny side of the street, where even what wasn't cleared has largely melted.

Part of the problem is the number of vacant houses. But not all of the houses with nasty ice in front of them are vacant.