Further bandgap troubles

Yes, that works. Except that out here there's the occasional 16 year old Joe Invincible who manages to wrap his Honda low-rider around a power pole and then the power is gone.

I sure have noticed that even with execs. There they are, at the airport, with the most expensive ThinkPad there is, playing solitaire.

What, no UPS? I even have a UPS on my home wireless phone system ;-)

I sometimes play solitaire at home while waiting for a simulation to finish. On the road I tend to read a complete book during the trip out-and-back.

Which reminds me...

Pros and cons on the Kindle? Readability in bright light? Readability in general? Can you highlight on those things? I'm a highlighter maniac :-) ...Jim Thompson

My wife has a Nook (Barnes and Noble's e-reader) and likes it a lot. It's a little more expensive than the Kindle but, at least what I could find, was more flexible WRT formats supported. Readability is bright light is superb, primarily because it's a reflective LCD (which kinda makes it useless in low light).

Well, I like mine, esp. for the price (mine was free... ;-) )

Easily readable in bright light, but no backlight, so you need light to read it. I have the text pretty big so it is easier to read, but that means that I read a page of text every couple of seconds. The buttons have a definite 'click' so it can annoy Pam a little. click...click...click...click... 8-)

I haven't tried the hightlighting or notation features yet. In fact, I haven't bought a single book for it. I have mainly the free guttenburg titles, like Wells and Verne, plus some books that came on a CD when I bought the latest Honor Harrington book. the CD has the entire series, and the ancillary titles!

Charlie

Unless you have half a garage full of marine deep-cycle batteries connected to it that's not going to do you any good.

Maybe a dry-erase marker would ... oh, wait, nah ...

All you need is a big-ass APC unit. At this location we've only been out maybe 30-40 minutes in the past 16 years.

At the old house we had a 3-day outage... thanks to a tornado :-(

In my busier years I actually toyed with the idea of an M-G set :-)

...Jim Thompson

That's slightly different out here. 1-2h is "normal", if it was an accident it can be a lot longer.

I won't go quite that far :-)

Even in that lightning strike on a local distribution yard 10 years or so ago that fried a bunch of stuff in the house... the power stayed on :-)

But we're on relatively new equipment, mostly underground. ...Jim Thompson

So are we but 3/4 of the village is electrified above ground and that's where stuff usually happens. Tree falls over, car careens into pole, things like that.

A small generator that you can start before the UPS dies is cheap enough.

Minor problem: I may not be there to pull the cord :-)

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What was his name, Jon, in Virginia? He can show you how to automate a transfer switch :-) ...Jim Thompson

Well there ARE electric start and small transfer switches that can be used with a sub panel to keep selected circuits live. Of course, you have to spend a little money.

Sure, but it doesn't make much sense in cases like this. I'd rather spend $1k more on laptop performance than an extra $5k for some fancy generator setup. We are talking SPICE simulations, not emergency room.

Whatever. If you ever have a severe storm in your area it could be out for days or weeks, even if the local distribution is underground. After one hurricane mine was out for almost seven weeks.

Ouch. They don't let us hang there for this long. The longest one was a harsh winter many moons ago, 10 days I was told. We didn't live here back then. Thing is, you've got to be prepared and we are to some extent. When the power went for more than a day we still had a fancy gourmet meal including Whiskey-peppercorn sauce and all that, from ye olde Weber. You just have to make sure you cook the stuff from the freezer first because it'll rot otherwise. So, I didn't exactly lose weight :-)

Businesswise it's lights out anyhow because the broadband will go. Dial-in can still be done but nowadays that's a pain.

There were over 1000 broken power poles and lines snapped on some high tension towers. A lot of areas had extra capacity and could backfeed an area, once the broken wire was disconnected. There are a lot of isolation switches in the local grid to let them isolate the easy repairs, and turn each section back on after it is repaired.

Broadband (Road Runner) & cable TV worked through most of that, because of the large UPS scattered all over the cable system. They sent their trucks out with generators to charge all of them in rotation. They bought extra generators and hired people with pickup trucks to do some of it. That's why I have a small LCD TV that will run from a 12 v battery.

TV was the least of our concerns. We had a 12V TV but I kept myself busy with more important things, like cooking up a storm on the barbecue and keeping the beer cold :-)

How do you do that... drink it all before it warms up ?:-) ...Jim Thompson