Friday, January 4, 2008
Storm day. Still groggy when I woke up this morning, I wondered why someone was jiggling our front door over and over again. After going to the bathroom and waking up some more, I realized that it wasn't someone but something. Our front door is loose in its frame by just a few millimeters, and I never noticed until now, when extremely strong gusts were blowing due to a mighty rain storm that has hit the Bay Area. This wind was strong enough to continuously jiggle our door in its frame, even though the door doesn't face the outside directly. I looked outside and I could see trees being thrown around back and forth like I had never seen before with an accompanying howling wind, and a light rain was falling. I heated up some water in the microwave, and after it finished the power immediately went out. I went to shut down the computers gracefully because I hadn't hooked the UPS cable up to the iMac yet. No problem shutting the iMac down, but the headless Mac Mini wasn't responding to remote access. After a bit of quick thinking, I stole the keyboard from the iMac and plugged it into the Mac Mini, logged in blind, then used the keyboard shortcut for shutting down, which I had learned and memorized only a day or two ago. After a few minutes, the Mac Mini turned off, to my relief. Shut down the UPS. Called in to work and decided to stay home for today (taking a vacation day)—it just didn't look safe to me to leave the house. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Our power came back on a few hours after it had gone out. There was no lightning or thunder for the entire morning, so I felt it was safe enough to hook up the rest of the computing equipment and start it up. Lunch: burritos. Patrick, used to New Orleans hurricanes, didn't feel like staying home and left to visit Aaron. Napped. Dinner: leftover burrito. Worked on e-mail issues for Recharge. Sam came over late because there was no power at his place in Daly City. I figured out how to get the scanning interface restored. Earlier I couldn't figure out where Brother put the appplications, but I found them today in /Library/Printers/Brother/.