It's been X days since my last failure or success Battery Geek Survives LA Firestorm

You know how industrial sites have big boards that have changeable numbers to show how many days they have gone without an accident. It's a good thing to go long stretches without an accident. At least in the case of an industrial site. It would be hard on moral if it were always posted at the entrance to a factory, "one day since the last event." The systems guy in me thinks there must be a tradeoff between pushing productivity against the risk of injuries.

For myself, I have tried to use the industrial standard of avoiding accidents for as long as possible. Over the production floor of my life the banner could read "10 years since my last accident." I am thinking now that it has been a fallacy for my personal development. If I don't try something and fail on a regular basis, I don't know my limits, I am not going to grow or succeed at anything. It should not be more than a day since I last tried to do something and failed.

The Fire Storm

This last week we hunkered down at home after a huge windstorm followed by some big fires in the hills around the edges of Los Angeles. Smoking embers fall like snow in Los Feliz from the fire east of us at Flintridge. It gives everyone a reason to wear masks. My eyes are itchy, and my throat is scratchy. The fires are not so close but the threat of embers starting a fire in Griffith Park next to us is a big worry. The park is closed as a precaution.

No power, it feels like a snow day.

When you look at a map of Los Angeles we are in a nonsensical situation. While we live in the heart of the LA sprawl extending 40 miles in every direction, we are on the edge of the power grid because there is a giant mountain and nature preserve right next to our neighborhood, Griffith Park. The city has let trees get too big above us on Los Feliz Blvd, when the wind blew down came the trees and with them the tenuous strip of power lines that keeps Los Feliz in sparks. "It's a very bad design." With no power there are no streetlights or signals, so driving is a bad idea. The cell tower for our work phone also lost power. We had to walk down to the village to pick up a signal and get messages. Our neighbors started checking in asking when power was going to come back on so they could come home. That seemed like a long snow day.

We got by on batteries and BIC lighters.

I am just a big enough tech geek to have a battery bank to keep our phones and emergency lights running. When we got the internet back on, I started looking at what kind of battery backup would keep our wireless router running in a similar event. That is if the internet provider was also able to keep functioning. Because, when we did get power back the internet was still down. What is the value of my router working on a battery backup if there is no service available? I put a pin in the idea for now. This is a once every five-to-ten-year event, next time we could just check into a hotel down the street that has power. Cooking in a black out was as close to camping as I ever wanted to be. I stuck an emergency light to the shelf over the stove so I could see in the dark. The gas oven would not light manually with a lighter, but in a power outage the cooktop will light with a BIC lighter. I fried up Tater tots into a potato hash, toasted buns over the gas flame and fried turkey burgers and onions. Everything tastes good camping.

What am I reading this week?

Necromancer | William Gibbson

I just rented an apartment to a guy who works in 3D modeling of reality. He used software on his phone to scan the apartment to create a real-life simulation for buying furniture that will fit the space. That made me think of Pattern Recognition by Willam Gibbson, I love Willam Gibbson, I checked to see if he had anything new. No, but I always wanted to go back and read Necromancer which is the first book of a trilogy from 20 years ago.

It's a near future situation with augmented people jacking into software to fight wars and do crimes in cyberspace. It's the right genre for a geek who has battery backups for everything in his apartment.