We loss power at the house yesterday, which served as a reminder that the insubstantial (and crappy) UPS that I’d been using was not at all up to the task of keeping my main desktop PC running. So yesterday evening I made a stop at Best Buy and bought a honkin’ big APC Back-UPS XS 1000.
I’m reminded what a great quality product APC makes. The old serial interface has been replaced with a nice USB based on that gives a ton more information to the UPS software. Well worth the extra dollars over the other crap brands that Best Buy sells.
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Oh, and when the power went out? The fire alarm started going off about a minute later. Your mind races with that kind of thing… am I sans power because my basement is in flames? So I checked inside everywhere and couldn’t see anything. For surreal effect, cue the cats meowing and hiding and the dog mewling in a very pitiful way, all because of the combined fire alarm & UPS cacophony and my visible distress.
I went outside and got to the far side of the house when I saw what looked like smoke colored stains on the blinds in the master bathroom. Turns out they were sun burned, but that didn’t stop the sprinting that caused me to tear ass around the front of the house, into the kitchen to grab the fire extinguisher, than back into the master bathroom.
Okay, sure, I don’t have a runner’s physique, but I was hampered a little bit by coming off a really bad case of the flu on Sunday, which apparently put some crap into my lungs… I spent the next 12 hours or so hacking it up. Very pretty sight. Oh well, at least the house wasn’t on fire. :-p