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might be my shortest day ever


bikeman564™

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got in before 8 and cleaned up back conference room due to working with slobs, so it was not a complete trash can for my 11 am meeting.

I kind of wish the power would go out, but our facility has back up power, and is served by dual circuits on top of that.

Gonna be a long day as I will be combing through years of electronic files to build a data room / due diligence room in our drop box.  yay.

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1 minute ago, bikeman564™ said:

I don't do rain, I'm fragile and will melt :D

Oh my gosh.

I don't like to do MTB in rain.  Riding in the wet ruins trails.  Pavement is not so bad in the rain.  One of my bikes is a Giant Seek.  It's the best bike for the cost in the fleet.  I beat the living shit out of this bike and it just goes. It has been my commute horse for the last 8 years.  It climbs like crazy, has all kinds of rack mounts, can handle some light trail with ease, and has full fenders.  When the snow flies, I can trust this bike to handle it.  If it gets too deep, I have to take the bus.  8"+ and I have decided that a bus or a walk is acceptable.

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3 minutes ago, Square Wheels said:

Our power at work has never gone out.

Ditto.  I think our office is on the "White House grid" so it is fairly robust to begin with.  They likely then have all the additional generators and back-up power options beyond ours, but it's safe to say that our little part of DC has a "special" level of power supply.

At home, we lose it so infrequently that you are totally shocked when it happens.  But all our lines are underground except the huge monster ones that feed NoVA.

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2 minutes ago, Longjohn said:

That’s a good thing considering where you work.

I wonder if they power the whole place on generators to keep it all running?

At one of my prior offices, all the orange outlets were on the generator loop, but any regular colored outlets were on the non-generator electric loop.  If power went out, the main systems - AC, security, some lighting, and anything in the orange plugs - kept on going, but not the non-essential stuff.  I liked that system, but it definitely was more costly to install initially.

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Our building is 2 doors down from a pretty large substation and is fed underground from that facility.  In the 26 years we've been here I think we have lost power 2 or 3 times.  That doesn't count the occasional building maintenance weekend planned downtime for something they needed to do.  An occasional lighting strike might make the lights blink and reset the clock on the microwave.

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8 minutes ago, Mr. Grumpy said:

Can't you use something like PowerChute to gracefully shutdown the systems after a couple minutes?

I do.  But it's not straight forward.  The virtual servers have to shut down, then VMware, then the hardware.  And the virtual environment doesn't come back up on it's own. 

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3 hours ago, bikeman564™ said:

Got to work, power went out 5 minutes later. 

At least you got to work. In 1972, right after Hurricane Agnes passed through, I spent a couple hours fruitlessly trying find an unflooded place where I could cross the Patapsco River and do lab work at UMBC.  After I couldn't, I called someone who lived on the other side of the river and had keys to my lab and gave him instructions for how to shut-down all the experiments.

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3 minutes ago, MickinMD said:

I spent a couple hours fruitlessly trying find an unflooded place where I could cross the Patapsco River and do lab work at UMBC.  After I couldn't, I called someone who lived on the other side of the river and had keys to my lab and gave him instructions for how to shut-down all the experiments.

That sounds like the beginning of a science fiction movie.

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1 hour ago, JerrySTL said:

Power outages were some of my longest days. Getting the servers and databases back up and running could take hours once power was restored. Often the UPS and backup generators didn't work.

IT people never want to test the back up systems because they might not work 

Then when they are needed, they often don’t 

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19 minutes ago, Further said:

IT people never want to test the back up systems because they might not work 

Then when they are needed, they often don’t 

At one of the credit unions I used to work at, they had backup generators to run the buildings in case of brown or blackouts. One learning experience was when they didn’t keep the batteries topped off and the generators couldn’t start. Only day we went home early. 

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I had a customer that has a generator to keep servers and desktops in customer service running along with almost everything else in the building.  They were 24X7.  Saturday morning about 9am the power went out with a handful of CS reps working in the middle of the building.  The generator kicked in and the CS reps never knew there was an issue.  They kelp working as usual.  The IT guy on call that weekend gets pinged that the place is on generator power so he heads in to head off any issues.  About the only thing not on backup power was the security system.  He couldn't get in the building - no way no how...  He couldn't call in to one of the CSRs because he couldn't get in contact with them without a customer account.  They were happy to work away until the end of their shift.  They got suspicious late in the afternoon when no one from the next shift showed up to take their places.  That's when he could get in the building.  He had the electrical contractor in early the following week.

Lesson learned - Test everything like it's a real situation.  Had there been a true emergency they would have been breaking down doors.

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Where my wife worked they had emergency drills where everyone had to exit the underground facility with all the power off in case there was ever a problem with the backup generators. She said it was spooky. She had a large company flashlight in her desk. Most everyone had their cell phones. It was good to see they were thinking ahead.

One time at the forge they blew something that controlled all the lighting. We still had power to the presses and conveyors and furnaces. It happened at night and the only light we had was the glow coming off the hot steel. I kept on running my press line. The foreman came over and shut us down, he said it wasn’t safe running in the dark. I thought it was pretty cool.

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3 hours ago, Further said:

IT people never want to test the back up systems because they might not work 

Then when they are needed, they often don’t 

Not only that, there is never really time unless someone steps up and is willing to forego something else to make time for adequate testing.  Foregoing things that ostensibly make money is not in most manager's repertoires.

I just had a failure of testing.  The van is sitting in the driveway, and I saw I could sell it on craiglist, but it won't start now, I 'spose since I have not been running it once per week like I should have been.  I am pretty sure if it had a carb I could just dump a touch of gasoline in there and it would crank up, but I don't know of any way to do that with fuel injection.  What a Dumas!

Hmm, I just watched a bubba Youtube that says to leave the key on so the fuel pump runs for like 30-60 seconds first - brb!

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1 hour ago, Longjohn said:

We still had power to the presses and conveyors and furnaces. It happened at night and the only light we had was the glow coming off the hot steel. I kept on running my press line. The foreman came over and shut us down, he said it wasn’t safe running in the dark. I thought it was pretty cool.

Probably looked like Orcs forging weapons under ground at Isengard.

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6 hours ago, Philander Seabury said:

Not only that, there is never really time unless someone steps up and is willing to forego something else to make time for adequate testing.  Foregoing things that ostensibly make money is not in most manager's repertoires.

I just had a failure of testing.  The van is sitting in the driveway, and I saw I could sell it on craiglist, but it won't start now, I 'spose since I have not been running it once per week like I should have been.  I am pretty sure if it had a carb I could just dump a touch of gasoline in there and it would crank up, but I don't know of any way to do that with fuel injection.  What a Dumas!

Hmm, I just watched a bubba Youtube that says to leave the key on so the fuel pump runs for like 30-60 seconds first - brb!

Whelp? Didja gettit started?

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