The Great 2006 Blackout

Yesterday didn't really go as planned from about 11am on. That's when I got to work and found out that we'd been without power since 7am. It's really hard to get any work done in a computing research center without any electricity. It is rather funny to observe people wandering the halls like lost sheep saying things like "I can't even let people know the meeting is cancelled because email is down." Gives one pause to think about how dependent we are on computers. About 4pm we got a 2 megawatt diesel generator delivered (If that number doesn't mean anything to you, it's easily big enough to supply power to a neighborhood of 150 large family homes), and spent another couple hours connecting it to the building power feeds, which is an interesting process in itself if one happens to be a slightly nerdy electrical engineer... All that to say that we didn't have power until 6pm and then we spent another 4 hours getting critical services (Lights, HVAC, Email, and Internet, in that order) running again. I got home around 11pm. The generator isn't large enough to handle the main research computers, so we won't have those until main power is restored in about a week. So not an especially productive day, but certainly an interesting one :-)