Speaker For The Diodes - August 31st, 2011

01:46 am - Power On

Electricity came back on at 22:42, while I was on the phone with Sheepie, just as she was checking the BGE outage website to see whether it had anything useful to say about Mom's neighbourhood.

I turned on an overhead lamp to better see the stuff I was plugging back in (on the powerstrip the cablemodem and router/hub are attached to, I'd unplugged everything else so I could just plug the conveniently located other end of it into the inverter), and realized that I'd been looking at the inside of this house by candlelight for just long enough that electric light made it look wrong. (I'm pretty sure this effect will have gone away by the time I wake up in the morning.)

05:24 am - QotD

"[...] they don't realize that things like regulations are often not only necessary but desirable - not an evil but a Good Thing.

"A mechanical regulator prevents a machine from running too hot, too cold, too fast or too slow. A voltage regulator keeps the electricity flowing the components at a steady level. Both forms of regulation keep equipment from blowing up or burning out. This is what regulations are supposed to do. True, if done badly regulation can add unnecessary work and parts making a machine - or a system - perform poorly. Both conservatives and libertarians want to smash the regulations and let the machine run wild." -- malada, 2011-06-26

[overlaps an earlier QotD by a line]