Finn Hill has already had our first 20 hour blackout this year.  The big news is still the weather.

I'm surprised at the extent of the lack of preparation in Seattle for any unusual conditions.  It has been 6 years since the big earthquake and we still don't have emergency communications in place.   Metro is especially negligent.  Last November, I waited on a busstop for more than an hour with no busses coming.  When I phoned Metro, there was no announcement about their lack of service, nor when to expect the service to resume.  Similarly, there was no information on their website.

It would have taken 2 people to do a little work:  someone to record an announcement for the phone, someone to redirect the website to an emerency service page for Metro to be responsive to their customers and to their County.  It didn't happen.  We can expect more of the same in the future.

Cell phone coverage was spotty, although it could have been worse.

Today the city is getting ready for a cold front from Alaska.  I'm going in to work very early because the University is going to be doing maintenance on our electrical circuits and network and I'm going to shutdown and bring up the servers gracefully.

I still don't have my contact page working properly, but I'm a little closer to fixing it.  I've been spending so much time at work that I haven't had time to do my own website projects.

Last April my "to do list" looked like this:

1. Get Mailman working for Seattle LinuxChix
2. Refactor my home page so that the layout is controlled with CSS instead of tables
3. Set up all my links pages so they pull the links up from flatfiles or a database, to reduce work when I CRUD (create, read, update, delete) links.
4. Set up a DNS server

I can cross number 2 off the list.  the other items stand.

My job at work is basically to hold things together as well as possible without spending too much money while all the old equipment falls apart around us.  So far what has died from hardware failure is:  2 servers, 1 back-up jukebox, 1 raid device, 1 UPS battery, oh yeah, and the cooling system caused a flood.  This is all in my first 3 months of work.  In the last 3 months, there have been 4 weekends when I haven't needed to go in to work to do maintenance on the servers.

For all the problems at work, I'm still having lots of fun.  I really enjoy the people I work with.  It has been a long time since I've felt like I "belong" somewhere the way I feel like I belong there.  I keep finding that the people I'm working with have major things in common with me:  many things that I thought were fairly rare.  Both my immediate supervisor and the SA who had my position before me have been to Turkey and know Turkish.  The programmer is a vegan, plus he's very considerate and super intelligent.  There is a retired computer sciences department head from Washington University (in St. Louis, where I spent some time) hanging around for fun (helping with the programs that process the data) and he and I find all kinds of things to chat about.  Although I don't work with the scientists directly, we all enjoy lunching together occasionally.  One of them holds knitting classes weekly - which is a great excuse for the women to get together and bond.  One of the women is from New York City and her cultural background is so close to mine it almost feels like I grew up with her.

I've only been spending about 1 day per week riding the trail, which is not enough.  All the winter-blooming plants are blooming or getting ready to bloom.

Right now there is snow on the ground around our house.  There's snow on the boat-building shed.

Just this last week, most of the remaining fallen trees and debris from the wind-storm in early December has been removed.