[VAXman(Admin)]

Many of the Ocean County (my home county) shore towns are no more. There are places here where I took the Euro-moonies when they visited with me the week prior to RoSfest that no longer exist -- well, they exist but they don't look ANYTHING like they did before. I have great doubts that there will be a quick resolution to this nightmare for many that resided in these towns.

As for the comments about things we take for granted and rely upon...

Like a pavlonian dog, I kept reaching for the light switch when I entered darkened rooms and my garage. It's a reflex we've all developed in our 21st century, everything's electric, lives. The morning's coffee is usually brewed by the time I get up because of an automatic electric drip coffee maker. To make coffee, I had to fill the kettle with water, put it on the stove to boil and then pour the water over the coffee grounds in the drip maker's basket. I usually use whole bean and grind my coffee fresh, but because of the forewarning about possible long periods without power, I purchased a bag of pre-ground coffee. That's really roughing it!

Without power and communications for the week was a bit unnerving for this, yours truly, internet junkie and workaholic. However, I didn't sit about twiddling my thumbs either. I took the time to do some maintenance on the equipment here. All of the servers (AM's included) were unracked, taken outside and thoroughly cleaned. I went through 2 large cans of compressed air blowing all of the accumulated dust from the insides of the boxes. One almost didn't get cleaned because I could not find the key to open its case. I then remembered that I had a master key for these particular barrel locks. I also cleaned up some of the ethernet cabling.

I finally got wired Gigabit ethernet working on my HP Envy 17.3" laptop which is running Ubuntu Linux. I also installed and configured an Alpha processor emulator on the Envy laptop. During the brief 2-3 hour periods that I had the generator running, I reconfigured the routers here too. The main router now also has it's radios configured to provide another wireless network. The pavlonian impulses also came to light while I was doing these tasks. I found myself, on several occasions, trying to Google for some information I wanted. Hmm... the peal of the bell and I began to drool!

Because I'd lost one of my UPS, I had to wire up a power distribution panel to get the systems back up running when power was restored. A trip to several home supplies and an electrical supply were needed to get all the parts... Places like Lowes and Home Depot, strangely, had their electrical part aisles fairly well picked clean. Apparently, people were making their own electrical connections for generators when the cache of electrical extension cables went fallow. I salvaged the the L6-30 from the UPS and used it because I couldn't find such a plug anywhere. This is the 250V/split-neutral found on many heavy-duty generators. I'm guessing that people bought these to wire their generators into their home distribution panels as whole-house units. Dangerous for the repair linemen if the panel's main breaker is not turned off.