while nothing to rival the great electrical storm of ought-one in terms of shear descrutcive force, there are these gremlins that live at my apartment and fuck around with the power.
they hibernate most of the year, but every so often, something stirs them from their slumber, and they get pissed. they start stomping around the circuit breaker creating my own private brownout. constantly. the voltage fluctuates (and i'm estimating, here) between about 55 and 150 volts utterly at random and without warning.
now, most electronics run on 3.3-12 volts and have some magic smoke inside them that doesn't really care what the input voltage is. all of that gear keeps humming along no matter what, silently dieing inside of the electronic equivalent of heart arrhythmia. the things that *do* react are the lights, the fans and the increasingly poorly named uninterrupted power supply. i'd say that these things are the most obnoxious things that could possibly be interrupted all the time, but i think that maybe if the computers went in and out every 15sec-30min i might have already gone on a killing spree.
well, the other night a young and foolish gremlin got a little drunk on all this power and went wandering into the telephone punchblock where he tripped, fell, threw up everywhere and passed out. as a result both the telephone and the dsl modem became paperweights. so for most of the weekend i was quite cut off from the world. it's all pretty well cleared up now, though there's still no answering machine.
the gremlins appear to be getting their fill of delicious electrons, though, and are beginning to fall back into peaceful sleep. now all i need to do is figure out what's waking them and convince everyone to cut that shit out.
they hibernate most of the year, but every so often, something stirs them from their slumber, and they get pissed. they start stomping around the circuit breaker creating my own private brownout. constantly. the voltage fluctuates (and i'm estimating, here) between about 55 and 150 volts utterly at random and without warning.
now, most electronics run on 3.3-12 volts and have some magic smoke inside them that doesn't really care what the input voltage is. all of that gear keeps humming along no matter what, silently dieing inside of the electronic equivalent of heart arrhythmia. the things that *do* react are the lights, the fans and the increasingly poorly named uninterrupted power supply. i'd say that these things are the most obnoxious things that could possibly be interrupted all the time, but i think that maybe if the computers went in and out every 15sec-30min i might have already gone on a killing spree.
well, the other night a young and foolish gremlin got a little drunk on all this power and went wandering into the telephone punchblock where he tripped, fell, threw up everywhere and passed out. as a result both the telephone and the dsl modem became paperweights. so for most of the weekend i was quite cut off from the world. it's all pretty well cleared up now, though there's still no answering machine.
the gremlins appear to be getting their fill of delicious electrons, though, and are beginning to fall back into peaceful sleep. now all i need to do is figure out what's waking them and convince everyone to cut that shit out.
