When the lights went out: My 'leccy-induced, bog floor crawling HORROR Feeling old? Clapped out? Weary of the cut and thrust of everyday work? Looking for a role that pays shitloads of dosh while demanding no relevant experience or demonstrable skill, but chairmanship of the Co-Op bank remains tantalisingly out of your league due to your clean living and good character? Tough. Get back to work …
> But much of this requires investment up front
Yes, so it screws the poor. Which is unfortunate when rising prices are a result of market forces, but downright nasty when the prices are deliberately engineered upwards by our lords & masters for our own good.
Am I the only one who finds the whole thing about "Motion" sensors in toilets a deeply disturbing concept?
How do they work? A covert camera in the pan, aimed at the sitter's posterior, continually monitoring for the required defecatory action and plunging you into Stygian darkness if the required turds do not manifest themselves in a timely fashion?
As to electricity, well - if there _are_ power-cuts in future I just happen to have a little 3.5Kw Diesel genset and 1000 litres of fuel on standby. Meantime, the annual dividends from my investment in electricity-companies a couple of decades back easily cover their charges, leaving enough over for the obligatory bottle or two of Château d'Yquem for New Year.
The company I used to work for used, ahem, moving people detectors in the loo - but again, not in the cubicles, though the timeout was long enough not to cause embarrassment.
Strangely, the loos were the only places where people-detecting lights were used; the staffing level was high enough that the lights turning themselves off was very rare. On the other hand, the rest of the building - which had large windows and was brightly lit by sunlight for much of the time - had the lights manually controlled and they were left on all day every day, even in areas that saw little use.
Once, they asked for ideas on how to enonomise. All responses were completely ignored.
Every so often, we got notes round telling us to remember to turn our PCs off when we went home at night and turn the light off in the kitchen (just an alcove off the main office area). The general reaction: "Why the hell should we?"
Sounds unsafe to me.
The washroom where I work has a couple of LED lights that stay on (also have battery backup) when the main lights go off, only 2-3 watts. Not enough to read by but enough to see what you are doing.
Having all the lights go out sounds like something the BOFH would think up.
Being a certified 'old fart', one of the things I learned some years back was to always carry a keychain flashlight. With the current LED technology, it's small, bright and useful in many ways, not the least of which is searching out that connection on the back of the PC under the desk. Also has in the past been useful in just the situation you found yourself in.
Want a workable (virtually)perpetual motion machine?
Open a an entrance to wormhole in a gravity well, pointing upwards, place the exit some distance further away on the z-axis pointing towards the entrance.
Now drop a mass into the entrance...
Now I say virtually, as eventually the gravity well will be destroyed.
We just need stable wormholess that don't take require power to remain open now, see you in the 49th century ;)
I got one of those things we used to joke about years ago, a solar-powered torch, from a hundred-yen store in Akihabara. Small calculator-sized solar panel, a tiny rechargeable battery and three white LEDs on the front. Runs for several minutes and charges on the desk -- wirelessly! -- when the lights are on. Only thing better would be a RTG-powered torch.
I've got one of those tritium-capsule thingies hanging on a desklamp in my bedroom so I know where the lightswitch is. I got it mail-order from some bunch of shysters on the Web somewhere, I forget their name but their website's logo had a vulture's head on it, now who could they have been...
I've been thinking about RTG torches, too. The constant heat is an issue, so you wouldn't want more than a gram or so Pu238 (0.5 watts thermal) in there and would want to use the whole aluminum (presumably) frame as a heat spreader. You'd be lucky to get 0.05 watts of electricity out of it, which would directly power a rather sad LED or would nicely top-off a rechargeable battery in the hours it wittled away in your pocket.
Alas, a lot of places get twitchy about handing out even gram fractions of plutonium.
Performing as a comedy piano song duo.
Richard Stilgoe - I think it was this way around - launches into a parody of a big hit of Skellern's.
"This is the Ladies' - I'm a man,
Where am I - supposed to stand"
Skellern, judging by the sound, slams the piano lid on Stilgoe's fingers.
I'm a bit late chipping in but here are two comments.....
1) About 15 years back, the company I was working for took on a new recruit. A networking guy in his early 30's, who had come from the power industry, and work on "safety critical" systems. During the first few weeks/months whilst fitting in with the team, he would chat about his previous employment. Even back then he was commenting that the power industry was heading into a huge black hole (which the power companies were all aware of), and that by 2015-2020 the UK would be in a major power crisis: - old power stations (30-40 years old) were being or were scheduled for shutdown, coal was coming to an end, "green pressure" was starting to bite on all fossil fuels, the UK had not researched or kept up with nuclear development since the 60's, etc, etc, etc, and meanwhile our appetite for electricity was forever growing - not just at home, but our business in those days of the mid/late 90's was data centres and PoP's which were starting to appear and munch through kilowatt hours at an alarming rate.
2) At around the same time, give or take 5 years or so I was driving one morning up the M6. I was stabbing the buttons on the car radio and ended up on some local station somewhere. There was an article on the news about a power cut the night before which had left umpteen thousands of homes in the area with no power all night. After the news the DJ stepped in to have a little "backchat" with the newsreader and commented that he was one of the homes that had been blacked out. He and his wife had to fumble around in the dark to find if they had some candles and matches somewhere, whilst his kids thought it was really exciting and spooky with no power, and thought that candles were only for birthday cakes and couldn't actually be used to produce "real" light. He then went on to say, that after five - ten minutes the kids started to realise there was no TV, no DVD, no computer, no cordless phone, no microwave, no warm food, no light in the fridge, no heating, no light to see anything by anywhere except a couple of solitary candles, and then started to get really stressed about the lack of electrcity. The DJ/newsreader then went on to comment about how reliant we were now on electricity compared to when they were youngsters (aka in the 70's) when such things were relatively frequent and how we are not prepared for it, and how his kids had never ever experienced a power cut or had any concept that such things happened.
I'm not sure why I remember both anecdotes so clearly after all this time, but there was obviously a connection between them, and I guess it started to make me think about what to do if the power is off for more than 15 minutes every five years, or whatever we take for granted these days.
I'd be happy if it were only once per year (well, less annoyed anyway), but we've had 6 so far this year (town outside Newcastle Upon Tyne), and a friend down in Dover has had several in the last few months alone.
Wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact it also caused spikes that fried several servers, a couple of hubs and a couple of test machines (got kit for protection against surges, but not spikes (yep, completely my fault)), requiring a lot of kit be replaced.
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