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 …