Month: <span>December 2006</span>

Before coming up to Vancouver to escape the power outage, I was thinking about ways that I might be able to figure out when the power was back on at the house. I thought maybe I could hit my home web server, which should turn back on automatically, but the DSL line that goes to the house has a dynamic IP address, and I wasn’t sure if the computer would automatically update the dynamic DNS record automatically or not, so that’s not 100%.

A friend at work had a good idea — just call the house and see if the answering machine picks up. But I’m not sure it will come up enabled, or if it was even turned on before the storm hit. If not, then it will go to voicemail regardless of whether the power is on or not.

So I broke down and called PSE on my cell at $0.69/min roaming rates. They say that their current estimate is that power will be back on by Friday at 6PM, but it might be as late as Saturday. She said they’ve seen three different estimates in the last 24 hours, and with another storm approaching tonight, all bets are off.

So we’ll head back on Saturday. With a little luck, the power should be on when we get home. If not, then we’ll hit a Motel 6. At least it’s likely we’ll be home and warm on Christmas.

In the meantime, Cindy and I are going for a Massage this afternoon. As long as we’re on a forced "vacation", we might as well make the best of it.

Updated update: According to the service alert on the PSE website, it now appears that we may not have power ’till Sunday. What “a small number of customers in the Cottage Lake area” means, exactly, is the question. Are we part of that group or not? I guess there’s no way to know without calling them. Great.

We decided not to stick around for days and days more with no power, and hightailed it to Vancouver tonight. On the way we drove by the downed power lines near our house, on Woodinville-Duvall Road, and saw a couple of news trucks there. I guess it’s some of the worst, or at least most visible damage around, so the news crews are using it as a background for reporting on the continued power outage.

Turns out they weren’t the only ones who had that idea — the Seattle Times home page is featuring a photo of the same damage, which is about 1/4 mile from our dark, cold house. I took a screenshot.

As promised, here are a bunch of pictures taken with my camera-phone on Friday morning, after the wind storm Thursday.

I’m at work, so I have a bit of bandwidth, and a chance to try out the photo gallery tools on Fastmail.fm — simple but they work well for my purposes.

Fastmail seems to be a really nice service for the money — 2GB of mail and file storage w/IMAP, POP and web support for $25/year $40/year. They also handle custom domain mappings and some facny filtering features, and sub-accounts for multi-user domains. I was impressed enough that I switched from Runbox, which is getting slower and slower with the passage of time…

Anyway, the power is still out at the house, and will be for at least a few more days. It’s not clear that it’ll be back on by Christmas…

So we decided to go to Vancouver, BC at least till Sunday.

With a little luck I’ll be able to tell over the Internet when the power comes back on, since my computer will wake up when it does. Just have to figure out what it’s talking to online that will give ome indication that it’s awake, from a remote location…

Or I could just call the house and see if the answering machine picks up.