It was a great night - we timed dinner (by candle) to coincide with the official hour, though we intentionally ran longer than 60 minutes as we did last year. To get the full feeling of the event, we take our house off the grid at the main breaker... Our fridge and small freezer are usually so full, this isn't a problem. Last year, not knowing what to expect, we made a point to be free so we could wander about to see what others were doing. We met plenty of people out for a walk, which was great, but we were also underwhelmed by the show of support from some of the people in the immediate neighbourhood (one guy 'round the corner has enough lighting on his house that I'm sure you can see it from space - and he did NOTHING... though, in fairness, I'm not sure he didn't die five years ago and everything is on timer. Never seen him in person).
Toward the end of the hour, I pulled out an old battery-operated shortwave radio. We went questing for coverage of events on the AM band and sat in the dark tuning around for another hour or two. It was pretty nostalgic! the most distant station we tuned in to (with the built-in antenna) that gave station identification during the time we stopped on it was in Philadelphia. Not bad, considering we're just west of Toronto... I didn't realize that people still ran old Wolfman Jack shows on AM on Saturday nights.
When we did restore power, one of my Gigabit switches wouldn't fire up. I had two 8 port D-Links, here. Now - in the space of 3 weeks, both have failed. While replacing the latest unit this afternoon (bought Cisco/Linksys this time), I shuffled around some of the other wiring. Considering the power that my web server, household file server (media repository), and personal desktop computer suck powerwise - I've decided to continue a project I started last year... To make these puppies solar. Yeah, I'll proabably have to do some hardware swaps (conventional motherboard/CPU combinations are killers) and change the power supplies to something that will make more efficient use of a low-voltage feed, but I'm convinced it can be done. The theoretical payback will be something like 2 1/2 years (utilizing stuff I alreadh have on hand), but... This is the kind of stuff that gives one satisfaction!
