Why I am the alpha geek:

[theweaselking]

The power's been out for the last three hours.

When it died, I said "Hmm", finished my IM conversation, stopped playing Call Of Duty, saved my documents and open Firefox tabs, shut down my computer, and then went to watch TV until the power came back on.

I like being me. It's very convenient, sometimes.

Comments

[tomtherat.livejournal.com]

I'm told you also have a fancy blog that like everyone reads.

[possbert.livejournal.com]

When the power's out, I have been known to switch on the lights to look for the candles.

[thormation.livejournal.com]

Watch TV?

Do you have one of those old hand-cranked Zeniths from back in the 50's?

[paoconnell.livejournal.com]

The are advantages to having a backup power supply (though I don't have one of those yet).

Of course when your main Internet connection goes away, things are a little trickier unless you actually have another ISP with a connection (and power source) separate from the main connection.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Nope. I have a laptop with a long battery life and a big hard drive.

It's all *pre-recorded* TV, but that's the best kind.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I've got the router and cable modem hooked into the UPS. If I turn off the monster PC, they can go a good long while just feeding packets to my laptop. Because Rogers doesn't go down just because my block's lost power.

The UPS beeping gets annoying, fast. So I turned it off, which necessarily dropped the internet. But that was okay.

[paoconnell.livejournal.com]

I actually had my Comcast Internet feed (but not my cable TV) go away about 4 weeks ago, for about 8 hours (something wrong with the comcast.com server, nothing wrong with comcast.net). Hard to make that redundant.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Not hard, just expensive. You need two internet connections and a router with a pair of WAN connections and loadsharing. It's totally doable. Just costs a ton.

[paoconnell.livejournal.com]

Justifying (for instance) $100/MO for two connections instead of $50/mo for one connection is kind of hard. You can justify it as needed if you have a business whose connection to the Internet should rarely go down. Most of us aren't in that position.

My son in law does have a Web server business that has both DSL and cable modem connections, which keeps his customers connected most of the time.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yup. A UPS for $100, and then $75 for a new battery every two years, is easy. The two constant connections and the router that can handle both of them? That's a little more.

[jagash.livejournal.com]

Actually, you don't necessarily need the loadsharing or WAN connections. I had a DSL connection hooked up to my wired router and could easily use a usb wireless adaptor to switch onto the other available wireless connection.

The reason why we were paying that bloody much for internet connections though, were pretty lousy hence the cancellation of the DSL.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I use Verizon's wireless internet. $40 a month, wireless anywhere, doesn't go out with the power, and I could probably ICS it to other computers with ad hoc wifi if need be. Neat stuff.