June 03, 2005

silhouette3.JPG From the desk of Jane Galt:

Blackout

We're having a blackout here in London. This is the third such I've now been through in the past few years (the first two in New York). Luckily for me, this time I'm in my company's headquarters, which is on backup generator. Unluckily, I just lost several paragraphs of the story I have due in thirty minutes. More later.

Posted by Jane Galt at June 3, 2005 10:24 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
Comments

A cheap UPS is a sound investment.

Posted by: anon on June 3, 2005 12:48 PM

She'll just ask us how to make it work on
220V / 50Hz power in the UK.

Posted by: snark on June 3, 2005 12:53 PM

Jesus Saves, you should too.

Posted by: Rick DeMent on June 3, 2005 02:40 PM

Had one at my work last Friday. It fried our server, and I didn't get access to my files until yesterday.
Save AND backup. On the network and your desktop. PITB, but it would have saved me a lot of grief.

Posted by: Half Canadian on June 3, 2005 03:13 PM

Save and backup AND have a UPS.

Posted by: Rex on June 3, 2005 03:41 PM

Paging _ _ _ _ Galt.

Posted by: MTW on June 3, 2005 03:45 PM

It happens. Many years ago, I hit ctrl+s about every three sentences. Recently, more than once, I noticed I don't do this any more. I lost about 2 hours of work that way.

Posted by: AT on June 3, 2005 05:34 PM


"Third way" or "third world"?

Posted by: ellipsis on June 3, 2005 08:04 PM

I agree with the others: what kind of low-rent, two-bit, cracker-jack organization doesn't have UPS for every computer?

Posted by: justin on June 3, 2005 09:01 PM

Use a laptop, they have their own built in UPS.

Posted by: Stephen on June 3, 2005 11:57 PM

I haven't experienced data loss in a blackout in years (I live in Chicago, which seems far less prone to them...plus I work in a telco-grade datacenter with the entire floor on full-time UPS with a diesel generator on standby and 28 hours of fuel on-site) but frequent saving is still a good thing. After all, even if I'm not worried about the power going out, I could still do something stupid and need to recover from it. :)

Posted by: Matt on June 4, 2005 02:01 AM

meh, blackouts still happen during raging storms at MS. The important things, like labs and arcade machines are on UPS circuits, but in general offices aren't. Ah well, at least you can still play arcade machines.

Posted by: bago on June 4, 2005 07:59 AM

"I was writing a paper on it, when all of a sudden it went berserk, the screen started flashing, and the whole paper just disappeared. All of it. And it was a good paper!"
http://www.apple.com/switch/stories/ellenfeiss.html

Posted by: bobh on June 4, 2005 09:08 PM

I hope the blackout is over now!

Posted by: Brad Hutchings on June 5, 2005 03:07 PM

It's Enron's fault!

Posted by: Crank on June 6, 2005 12:32 PM

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