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Today was a slow day here. Laurell is doing better, though still not fully recovered, and as such, we spent most of the day watching TiVo’d television or DVDs. Then the storms hit in the afternoon and we lost power. This isn’t as big a problem as it was a few years ago, as we have a whole house generator, for just this kind of situation. It isn’t an instant change over, like you would have at a hospital or something like that, so the computers and the entertainment center (with the TiVo, which is a glorified Linux Box) are on battery back-up or Uninterruptible Power Supply. Today, I had the joyful experience of having the UPS fail.

The UPS are only needed for a few minutes until the generator kicks in and restores full power to the house. I was a little concerned when I heard the alarm beep from the UPS, but didn’t think much of it. Then I heard it again. And a few moments later it began to rapid cycle. Then the entertainment center lost power. I was not happy. We were in the middle of an episode fo Ghost Hunters that we’d TiVo’d Christmas Eve. I went to check to see what was wrong. I did a simple lamp test, and the outlet that the UPS was in was getting power, I switched plugs in the outlet, and still got power to the light. I checked to see if any breakers had tripped. None had. Then I went and checked the servers.

I was really not happy. The Servers were all off and the UPS in my office (witch is an exact replica of the UPS on the entertainment center) was alarming. I power cycled it, and everything came back up. I did a quick data integrity check, but thankfully, everything was OK.

Now I had a problem. We had power to the house, the circuit to the entertainment center was working fine, but I’d had two "identical" UPS in sperate parts of the house fail. Only one reasonable solution. Get new UPSs.

I called the local "Electronics" Store and asked if they had any, and they assured me that they had "lots". so I went out to shop, near a mall, on the weekend after Christmas. Madness, I know. I was surprised to find no crowds. Perhaps the storms had kept people at home. I didn’t care. I got my UPSs, because they did indeed have "lots" of them. I also switched brands and got larger battery capacity units. I also picked up a few things that caught my eye in the DVD section… Then it was a quick stop at a drive up for basic protein (we can do this occasionally on the Jenny Craig plan. The key is to only do it occasionally.) and then it was back home to fix the TV. It worked swimmingly. We ate dinner and watched a few more episodes of Ghost Hunters, the latest episode of Leverage, and then the Kiddo went to bed and we watched some CSI on DVD.

Now its time to turn in and get a good nights rest, because tomorrow is going to be busy.