Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Powercuts suck

We had a town-wide powercut for about forty minutes today :(

We had the electricians in our machine room at the time installing some new emergency lights, and so got to test one of them within minutes of it having been installed.

Unfortunately power cuts always mean work. In today's one, two machines suffered badly. The first was our voicemail server, the second was the software library machine. Both had serious disk objections to the power failure.

While the power was out, we noticed another little orange light on the mail server. We've lost a second disk in the raid array in two weeks. I'm not sure why, but I suspect this is bad(tm).

Anyway, all this got me thinking about how much we're dependent on power these days, and how a relatively small power outage creates an disproportionate number of problems, particularly for the computer side of things.

When did the world become this dependent on the flow of electrons? When did the flow of electrons become more important than the flow of water? Or is it? We need water to make electricity and electricity to get water to us. It is a sort of cycle, kind of the carbon cycle or water cycle. What do we call it? The hydroelectric cycle or something :)

Maybe I only become philosophical about things like this when I can't have coffee because there is no hot water ...

posted by guy at: 16:44 SAST | path: /general | permanent link