DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Power came back Tuesday afternoon, several hours ahead of schedule. The outage lasted three days and three hours, as determined by the cron log on my router.

I was wrong about being at the end of the line. The Press Demo reports: Thousands still without power.

Relevant statistics from this article:

• 1.8M customers lost power this week
• 8400 homes in Sonoma County remain without power
• Areas of Laytonville and Albion won’t be restored until Thursday

I don’t know where Laytonville and Albion are, except in the sense that they’re “further out” than I am, and I’m apparently already in generator country.

PG&E’s press release describes the damages due to winds:

• 460 damaged poles
• 296 miles of downed lines
• 560 damaged or broken cross arms
• more than 240 damaged transformers
• more than 8400 customers who are hungry for a PG&E executive’s blood because their power is still out

OK, I extrapolated that last one from the context.

The company claims it pays half its claims. The claims-program FAQ admits guilt: “If any … property is damaged because we … unreasonably fail to do something that should have been done, then we have an obligation to pay for reasonable damages.” What did they unreasonably fail to do? Trim trees.

PG&E has a long track record of failing to properly clear trees around its lines, according to the Chico Examiner. There’s more than a hint of scandal: “PUC investigators charged that PG&E had taken money from its ratepayer-funded vegetation management budgets to boost profits, which resulted in bonuses for PG&E managers as reward for cutting jobs. From 1987 to 1994, PG&E diverted $77.6 million from the tree-trimming budget, the investigators said.”

So, file those claims today!

48 hours after our lights went out, PG&E deigned to release an estimated repair time: 8:00 PM tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d seen lights all over town going on and off for two days. Every time the wind blows, another section of the county goes dark.

I knew there was some risk in moving farther out into the country, but I didn’t expect to be out of power for three days. It’s especially incongruous that the weather has been beautiful all day, and the utility is still blaming “storm conditions.”

We’re fortunate in some ways. We were out of town the first night. The second night was inconvenient but interesting, with rustic-adventure appeal; I read by candlelight, and wrote on my laptop in front of the woodstove. The third night began to suck, as food spoiled and the water pressure dropped to nothing. (Well pumps require electricity.)

My house is a wreck of takeout containers and unread newspapers. It smells of woodsmoke and scented candles. It sounds of silence — a sharp contrast to the loud music that is the pulse of the place whenever I’m conscious (assuming the power is on). Behind the silence is the low throbbing of the neighbors’ generators.

Yeah, we should have bought a generator too, but after five years at the old house we’d never needed one. Now, at the new house, we’re apparently at the end of the power line, lowest priority on the repair list for the guys in leather gloves and rubber boots. i think we’ll forego the generator and put a solar array on the roof instead.

An acquaintence on a local mailing list phrased it well: “We’re learning to live like the Amish, but are doing it with a lot less grace.”

Amen to that. Or, maybe, gesundheit, or something.

Stories like this give me a good feeling about small-town cops. The good feeling in question is relief that I rarely have to deal with them.

Suisun City, CA is a town of 28000. The police chief has just announced that he’s gay.

With that background, read this remarkable quote by Suisun City police officer Gail Hill:

I think a sigh of relief was let out by everyone in the department simply because it’s not a whisper in the hallway anymore… It’s out there, and we can deal with it. We’re a smaller department, and we’re a family. We are able to overlook people’s downfalls and shortcomings and treat people the way they should be treated.

I regret that the reporter of the story didn’t ask the police chief for a reaction upon learing that one of his staff equates homosexuality with a “shortcoming” or “downfall.”

Original story: Besieged Suisun City chief says he’s gay

Earlier this year I wrote a semi-sarcastic bit about the fumes generated by modern furniture. I never would have predicted that I’d ultimately buy the very desk I’d used as an example of fiberboard construction. Nor would I have predicted that after unpacking it, I’d have to move it into the garage to offgas for a few days.

The desk surfaces are beautifully made, but they smell like sawdust and chemicals. Which is what they’re made of, of course. They may also have picked up some odor from the packing crate (made of plywood, styrofoam, and glue).

If the fumes persist, you may notice some bizarre, meandering posts in this space, as my forebrain is slowly eroded by VOCs. (I’m sure some of you would insist this has already happened.)

Fun for math nerds: How many ways are there to lace a shoe?

This is the most interesting, refreshing sentence I’ve seen in the newspaper in weeks:

More precisely, this condition says the shoelace is not allowed to pass in a straight line through three consecutive eyelets on the same flap; otherwise, the middle of the three eyelets does not actively help close the shoe.

During a road trip a few years back, I wrote a PERL script to calculate how many unique combinations a burglar would have to try to brute-force the lockbox hanging on my back door (put there by a general contractor during a bathroom remodel). The answer was 715, fewer than what you’d expect from a 4-digit key (which in a more-secure design would yield 10^4 or 10,000 combinations).

Alas, my analysis did not get published in Nature, perhaps because the editors realized that the easiest way to brute-force a lockbox is with a hammer. And it would take a lot fewer than 715 blows.