Thoughts During a Power Outage
I am sitting in the cube outside my office, connected by wireless
to our corporate network in an otherwise darkened office. The power is
out - started around 3AM, and it is apparently affecting a large area,
not just this building.
- Kudos to the infrastructure team that strung up the wireless
access points here - thanks for plugging them into the same circuit
that is powering the emergency lights. not sure if that was by design
or a happy accident, but coupled with notebooks running on their
batteries, we have the ability to get some communication of status
out to the world.
- Some concerns about battery life, however - I use a Dell
Latitude D620, and it is (in my opinion) really poor at power
management. I expect to get about 60 total minutes of work out of the
thing - kinda sad if you ask me.
- No affect on my Blackberry - I am sending and receiving just
fine. If you haven't checked out Blackberry
Messenger, I'd look into it - definitely useful for sending out quick
updates to key folks.
- Not sure if it would do any good to call folks on my teams
re: working from home - zero insight as to when the power will come
back on. I just made an entry into my internal blog, so I suppose if
they happen to catch that post (or this one!) before they come in,
they can give me a shout on the cell phone to let me know if they are
coming in. Use best judgement - if you had a meeting scheduled, for
example, I would definitely come in, just in case.
- I just spoke to someone who did make it in - another early
bird like me. He heard on the radio coming in that this is affecting
a big part of the area.
- I tried to Google for a status update, but am not able to
find anything. That might be something nice for Commonwealth Edison /
Exelon to set up - definitely a shortcut that I would set up on my
Blackberry.
- This is definitely a case for Twitter - unfortunately,
that's blocked by our network policy.
I'm having a bit of fun here, blogging at near-real time to
capture thoughts. Part of continuous improvement and innovation is
capturing learnings from any situation, so this is my great experiment
on blogs as news delivery (as opposed to spouting opinions / capturing
deep thoughts - my regular meme / schtick).
That's all I know at this time ...