Some of you know today as π-day. But the real insiders know that today is the 30th anniversary of the 1.0 release of Linux.

Staycation: day seven. We had power back twice yesterday for a couple of hours each time. The weather and PGE were just teasing us, and I will not consider that a real break in the cold darkness and despair that is being without electricity. But I still have battery power, and while it froze some more overnight and outside is now very slippery, it’s once more above freezing. So frozen pipes remain a thing of the past. End result: I have a handful of pull requests left (most of which came in in the last few hours), and no reason to believe that I won’t close the merge window normally on Sunday.

Well that didn’t last long. Do I reset my staycation counter to day one, or do I keep this at day six?

.. and ten minutes after posting that, power and internet are back up. View quoted note →

Staycation: day six. To nobody’s surprise, power didn’t come back yesterday, but neighbors report that the tree across the power lines has been cut up. So hopefully the electrical crew can come in and fix the power line. Of course, there may be other issues lurking. We lost power at 5am Saturday morning, and apparently the tree fell a few hours after that. So now there are conflicting theories about where our power is actually fed from. Presumably somebody at PGE knows, but they aren’t telling. Once again - there is a pattern emerging - PGE reports that our otage will surely be fixed by 10pm today. And there are now sufficiently few outstanding outages reported that our little area with only 174 customers affected might actually merit some attention. In the meantime, while temperatures might dip just below freezing again, it won’t be bad enough to freeze any pipes again, so while the kitchen is at a balmy 8°C, I don’t feel worried about the house freezing. So I’ll continue the merge window on battery power.

Staycation: day five. Power still off, but outside is warming up. So now it’s a big ice rink outside with people playing bumper cars with the real things. Not interested in partaking in that particular contact sport, and as a result I’m still not leaving the house even if the worry about frozen pipes is fading. Instead trying to see how far I can get on the remaining merge window pulls on just battery power. Not very far I bet, but at least something. PGE claims power back tonight. Of course, they did that yesterday too…

The reason why it’s taking so long is mostly that we’re in a fairly sparsely populated area on the outskirts of town. So not only do we have a lot of these big trees around, PGE also always ends up prioritizing the areas with many more customers affected. But it doesn’t help that this really is a pretty massive tree, and it has also fallen in a way that makes it hard to remove, with the middle unsupported. One of our neighbors has a brother that is a logger, and he apparently thought you might want two trucks to get it out: one to support the tree while the other cuts it from above. Me not being a logger just nodded wisely. View quoted note →

Day four of no power and no Internet. This big tree is the reason. One among hundreds in the area, but this is the one that took out *our* power and Internet. PGE (Portland General Electric) claims we should get power back by 10pm today, but the ice storm arrives today, so we'll see.

I’m clearly a master of SEO. When I google for “cold dark place filled with sadness and despair” right now (with the quotes), google gives me exactly one result - my Linux kernel github repository. I will call my new hobby “Reverse Emo Googlewhacking”. You’re welcome.

Bye bye, nytimes. When the only thing that continues to work on you ad-filled web site is the captcha, I’m not interested in supporting your journalism any more. Ironically, another pet peeve of mine was the “you can sign up online, but you have to call and talk to a human to cancel”. But with apparently nothing but your main page (and your ads - surprise surprise) working, that was actually good for once.

Life is good. We have a dishwasher again. Our old one broke (again!) and while I fixed it myself last time, I wasn’t willing to deal with a dishwasher that keeps breaking. I grew up washing dishes by hand, and I’d largely forgotten how much I hated it. Ten days without a working dishwasher is ten days too many.