Blessed by the Potato

This security light has caused us nothing but trouble. First, it was old and cycling a lot (they’re supposed to be changed every 3 years from the listed manufacturer’s lifetime rating — but they don’t burn out like incandescents, they just start cycling more, drawing more and more power, while providing less and less light), and alone was consuming about a third of our household’s electricity use. Then we had to wait months for a dry day to try to get on the roof (it was just one of those winters/springs where the roof was constantly covered in snow or rain) to change it out. When we finally borrowed a ladder (and a brave soul) to get up there, we found that the model of sodium lamp used had been discontinued. Fortunately, our landlord managed to find one for us, and we had intense orange light scaring away car thieves for about 3 days.

Now it’s dead, and I have no idea why.

The landlord took the old bulb, and I suspect she threw it out, so replacing it to see if it’s the bulb or the fixture probably isn’t going to be an option. Likewise, those high pressure sodium lamps cost over $30 (and I have no idea where she found one), so just picking up a second to test out isn’t on the table. I feel bad bugging the landlord, especially since if it’s not fixed in a week I’m going to be off in Ottawa… Ugh.

There was a big power outage last night, lasted for almost exactly an hour. I’m glad the webserver came back up — my main desktop computer was on the UPS, so I had lots of time to give it a graceful shutdown (and secretly wondered how long my old CRT would have lasted on battery power, chalking up another point for the LCD flatscreen), but the webserver was only plugged into the surge protector and went off instantly. I was afraid it would get mad at me and not automagically start Apache, but it looks like everything went off without a hitch. I didn’t even have to adjust the DNS forwarding :)

I had a dream last night that my car was stolen, again. It was exceptionally vivid and realistic. So realistic that I actually woke up believing it was true; the first thing I did when I woke up was start going through rental company listings to make sure I could get back to Toronto this weekend with my cat… then saw that my car was actually safe and sound in the parking lot. It’s a strange experience getting lost in a dreamworld like that, especially after polishing off another issue of the Sandman that week.