Stuck on #PDX
Portland motorists confused by a power outage.
I live in Portland, Oregon, which mostly receives electrical power from Portland General Electric. Founded in 1888 the company was eventually owned by Enron Corporation from 1997 until 2006 until Enron went bankrupt.
See? I just used a writing technique known as foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing is a literary device by which an author hints what is to come.
–Wikipedia
By dropping the name Enron, you are now on notice that this story does not bode well. The portends are decidedly not in our favor. It’s time to omen up.
Yes, I’m being mysterious. I’m trying to leave you in the dark. Just like Portland General. Bazinga!
Being a major metropolitan area, the City of Portland is designed with security and reliability in mind. Power outages simply do not happen unless:
- The wind blows up to one (1) mph
- A squirrel gets hungry
- Water magically falls from the sky
- A drunk person, in a trillion-to-one event, rams their car into a pole
Such simple criteria means the city loses power about every 42 minutes. Who knew that cramming 625,000 people in the same area would make stuff happen? Yes, I live in a city where squirrels are frequently blamed for power outages.
At least Portland is safe. No one, not even a terrorist, could ever fuck with this city unless:
- A tweaked out kid needs to take a whiz in a city resevoir
- The wind blows and a branch falls and an entire power grid goes haywire
- Water magically falls from the sky
Portland has many names. The City of Roses. Bridgetown. Stumpdown. Rip City. Little Beirut. PDX. Cloud City. But, during autumn at least, it could also be known as The City of Leaves. (Leaves are the unpredictable byproduct of shitloads of trees.) And the city has a great strategy for dealing with them. “Clean ’em up your own damn self. You want your storm drains to work? Better get on it. By the way, we’re adding a street fee. You need to pay more taxes for this.”
So it rained on Sunday. We were out running errands. We had to retrace our steps. We drove through St. Johns. Then it started to rain. An hour later we went through the same area. It had already flooded the size of Lake Erie. It wasn’t even a heavy rain.
There had been a few brief gusts of wind. So, yeah, the power was already out. We pulled into a bar just as thunderous lightning spooked everyone in the place. They were amazed. Lightning? Wowwee. Perhaps Portland has exactly the power company it deserves?
We continued on our way and that’s when I noticed it. The traffic signals were are dark. None of them were red. None were yellow. None were green.
You know what that means, right? The entire city went Starman on steroids. Perhaps we can add “Starport City USA” to our lengthy list of nicknames?
[Starman is driving the car, and speeds across a recently turned red light, causing crashes for the other motorists]
Starman: Okay?
Jenny Hayden: Okay? Are you crazy? You almost got us killed! You said you watched me, you said you knew the rules!
Starman: I do know the rules.
Jenny Hayden: Oh, for your information pal, that was a *yellow* light back there!
Starman: I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.
Apparently the collective wisdom of the hipster lumbersexuals in PDX is this: No street light, go very fast.
That’s weird because the law says an unpowered traffic signal is to be treated as a four-way stop. It’s so weird that no one in Portland knew that. Keep Portland weird.
So we sat at an intersection watching an endless stream of cars whiz by at top speed and we never got a turn. To pass the time we celebrated several birthdays. And I plotted revenge. Now I understand where Joker, Riddler and Penguin are coming from.
This may be my last blog post for a while. I’ve decided to keep my computer turned off when I think Portland General will be unable to keep the grid powered. By my calculations that means I’ll have a 42-minute window of electricity per day.
Embedded: Twitter puts outage
Hide and seek. Did I scare you?
Earlier this week, Twitter went down. It went down hard. It was scary. I know because I was there. I now officially have the PTSD. At last, I’m finally somebody.
The duration of the outage was about 45 minutes. That’s approximately twice the amount of time Apollo 13 spent out of radio contact when it was behind the moon. I just got a double dose of what it must have felt like to be in Mission Control. And I’m a non-smoker!
It was the longest outage since Twitter’s IPO and the second crash in the last nine days.
The outage was described in the strongest possible terms as the “longest outage since the IPO.” What those two things have to do with each other I have absolutely no idea.
Some in the media took the opportunity to write quippish jokes about the mayhem. (Hint: It was too soon.) Jokes, I must say, that practically wrote themselves.
- “Twitter Suffers Outage During Biz Stone’s Panel at SXSW” – I don’t know what a “Biz Stone” is but I bet it was pissed. Source: WSJ.
- “Twitter Outage Takes Site Down for 45 Minutes, Users Stranded” – I bet a lot of them were forced to hitchhike. Source: Newsmax.com.
- “Twitter goes down, chaos and productivity ensue” – What the fuck are you implying? Source: Washington Post.
- “‘We Experienced Unexpected Complications’: The Language Of Twitter Outages” – Hey, that’s the hip new lingo. Source: Lifehacker Australia.
- “Twitter Goes Down: Something is Technically Wrong” – You have a firm grasp of the obvious. Souce: The Next Web.
- “Twitter Briefly Goes Down, Silencing Millions Of Horrible, Unnecessary Twitter Jokes” – That hurts, that really hurts. Source: Huffington Post.
Again, as your intrepid embedded reporter, I was there on the front lines. What follows are my eyewitness firsthand accounts of the action as it unfolded.
Continue reading →
Blighters On The Storm
It started like any typical horror story should. “Nordstrom.”
I screamed.
Our friend had driven in to the big city from our former hometown for a quick visit. It turned out to be the rainiest weekend since we moved to Portland, Oregon.
“Nordstrom.”
That word is Norwegian, I think, for “mythical beast with huge nords that consumes souls.”
And they wanted to shop at the one that lives in the heart of downtown, by Pioneer Square, where everything happens.
It was a rainy day. I figured at least there was at least a chance the city wouldn’t be nuts.
I was wrong.
Continue reading →
Twitter down low
“Twitter is currently down for <%= reason %>.”
And I was going to say something pithy, too. Oh well. You all have to suffer deprivation. Don’t thank me. Thank Twitter.
To add insult to injury I was told that my tweets were “forbidden” when trying to send them from my iPod. I had to turn to Google to learn that it was actually the whole world that was affected. Thanks for making me feel bad, Twitter. You might want to look into an error response that doesn’t blame the user when it’s actually your fault.
#twitter #fail
Top 10 things to do during a Twitter outage
What? I can't hear you! Something about fail and a whale?
Have you prepared your Twitter Disaster Response Kit yet? Hint: When Twitter is down, that might be a good time to think about it. Suddenly you’re going to have plenty of free time. Not that you’ll be able to microblog the experience.
Okay, first things first. Twitter is down. Maybe you get the legendary “fail whale.” Maybe it just sits there and just sits*. (Trust me. It’s not thinking.) Maybe the little circular “wait” icon keeps spinning and spinning to let you know it’s doing something. I tried to out-wait the icon but gave up after a quarter hour, thus burning any shot I ever had at my 15-minutes of fame.
If you merely get a blank screen, try to refrain from punching your monitor. That won’t help anyone.
Twitter is down. The first thing to remember is: Stay the fuck calm!!!!!! Do not bludgeon the heads of passerby unless absolutely necessary.
Continue reading →
Top 5 things to do while WordPress is down
WordPress
WordPress was down in that city by the bay. A hard down. The kind of down that made Army veterans want to cry.
And there I was wanting to work on my blog. But the blogs had been locked down in “read only” mode. It’s true. No doubt I’ll someday be telling my grandchildren about the great Read Only Crisis of 2011.
Sure, I could have loaded up a word processor or text editor and typed my thoughts elsewhere. And then, when WordPress was restored, I could have (shudder) copied-and-pasted my words into the Edit Post window. Gads.
But that path wasn’t for me. That was not the path of “cut off your nose to spite your face.” For me, even the road less traveled is still far too crowed.
So I just sat. And thought.
Here I present some of the thoughts that went through my head during that trying time.
- We bloggers use words, right? Well, most of us do. So why not adopt a word and make it your own? Go to Save The Words and do your part to help. I adopted the word “modernicide” which means the “killing of modern people.” When you undertake to save a word you take a vow to use the word “in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible and to the very best of [your] ability.”
- Twiddle your thumbs. Practice makes perfect and, if you’re good enough, you can go pro.
- Collect old newspapers and magazines from around the house and cut out letters to craft your very own ransom note. Who knows? If you get lucky you may even get to use it someday.
- Plan your own funeral or wake. What if, God forbid, they played Justin Bieber at your funeral? I’m not just going to sit here and let that happen! Go proactive and choose your playlist. For me that means lots of Disturbed (Another Way to Die) and Type O Negative (I Don’t Wanna Be Me). It’s going to be important so don’t leave the shindig to chance.
- This one takes a bit of money but it’s worth it. Go to your local tattoo shop and bribe the “artists” there to deliberately misspell words. Do not underestimate this activity. It’s good clean fun!
- Bonus. Call the Karma Police and hang up.
- Bonus. Count the leaves on a tree.
- Bonus. Take a soapbox downtown, put it on a city sidewalk, stand on top, and try to convince ten passerby they are going to Hell.
- Bonus. Think of your most favorite food in the whole wide world. Now go look it up on the internet until you learn the bitter TRUTH about how it is really made. Ha ha ha! You’ll never eat that again!
This would have been a top ten list but, curses, WordPress came back up. Oh well, maybe more next time.
This post delayed by the weather
Lazing on a Sunday afternoon
“I got a little cooked, but I’m all right!”
With those words today, Tom B. Taker let the world know he was still alive and well.
Wait. Scratch that. Well, one out of two ain’t bad. 🙂
And, to be quite honest, I think Luke Skywalker was the first to utter those words. But I feel confident that whatever Taker said was just as impressive.
No, your humble host wasn’t caught in an earthquake. Nor was it a tsunami, either, although those are both serious weather phenomenon to be sure.
(On a side note, it doesn’t feel that peculiar to be talking about myself in the third person after all.)
No, the circumstances that affected Taker were far more mundane. You see, there was a bit of cloudy weather. And then came the raindrops. Then the wind kicked up and the rain fell a little harder.
And then…
There was a flash of white light.
“Holy mother of God,” the cry went out. “It’s lightning! Batten down the hatches!”
He sprinted across the house to power down the computer but it was too late. The power had already gone out. There would be no ordinary shut down of the computer this time.
You see, in his neck of the woods, a bit of rain, a skosh of wind and a lightning bolt or two is all that is required to knock out the power grid. Repeatedly. For hours.
Yes, this really is the year 2011, the most advanced year we’ve had to date, and astronauts drink Tang, too.
Ah, the weather. For all of humankind’s magnificence, we are still very much at the mercy of things like the weather.
Personally I could care less about the weather. I hardly ever check the weather reports. The weather will be what it will be, right? I tend to be fatalistic about it. And no news or media outlet warned me there might be a lightning storm today. I used the Mother Nature notification system instead. That’s also know as “looking out the window.”
When the power came back up long enough, I did briefly turn to the Weather Channel out of curiosity. They were glad to tell me that the temperature in my town was 54 degrees. Gee, thanks. That’s useful information. I’m sure my outside thermometer outside the kitchen window couldn’t have told me that.
Who thought the Weather Channel would be a good idea, anyway? Weather is to be tucked away on a corner of the newspaper or given a few minutes on the news broadcast. It is not “entertainment” or very useful information in and of itself.
“Hey, let’s invent a television network that no one will ever watch for more than five minutes at a time.” Great business model.
That might be why the Weather Channel decided to add a little excitement by showing movies. Yep. Movies. The Perfect Storm is a no brainer. And so is Twister. Those movies promeninetly feature weather phenomenon.
But what else is there? Just how many movie plots have been driven by the weather?
Singing in the Rain? Ha!
How about March of the Penguins? I thought that was more about penguins than the weather. And the weather is sort of monotonous. “Today’s forecast is snow and cold.”
Well, how about Misery starring Kathy Bates and James Caan. Didn’t she win an Oscar for that performance? Sure, but what’s the weather angle? Oh, wait. The Caan character crashed his car because of the weather. That’s a perfect tie in!
Not content to just run someone else’s movies, though, The Weather Channel decided to make their own content. Yeah, everybody knows that’s the only real way to have a seat at The Big Table.
Thus, When Weather Changed History was born. This informative television series answers the big questions like: “If it wasn’t for the weather did you know the Hindenberg would have crashed somewhere else?”
True, dat! Or how the “weather” affected the Titanic. Um, wait one. Are they saying that icebergs are weather? Seriously?
“Next up, how huge chunks of ice may affect your evening commute. More about that and other stories in three minutes after these messages by Dunkin Donuts, Burger King and Toyota.”
What other events from history make their list? Hurricane Katrina. Okay, that one is legit.
Oops. I have to cut this post short. I just looked out the window and the ground is still wet. We might be loosing power and I don’t want this post to be lost to humanity.
The weather today did change history when it turned off the power to my house. Unfortunately we’ll never know the “could have been” of that alternate unaltered historical timeline. We’ll never really know what might have been irrevocably lost.
Shouts from the Abyss 
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