Outlook 2007. The latest and greatest verison of Microsoft’s flagship e-mail, communications and calendar platform. And it keeps crashing when my e-mails contain… pretty pictures. Or Chinese characters. So as long as I don’t get any e-mails with either of those in them, I’m ok.
Better not browse any Chinese art galleries. Vista will implode. I think I’ll just keep this idea in my back pocket as a sort of kryptonite in case ByTor goes HAL 9000 on me.
(Making up for lost time)
Our office is a two-story Art Deco style brick building, with what you might call inventive electrical work inside, stemming from years of patches to the original system. Given that we are in urban Northern Virginia, not say the Pacific Rim, we are definitely NOT earthquake-proof.
So, what hits us, square in the middle of an all-staff meeting? Yeah, earthquake. Since none of us is familiar with the experience, we all thought it must have been some particularly loud dump truck rumbling by or some other more familiar city experience. But the news services ’splained it to us later that day: check for molten hot magma, baby, that’s a quake.
Then later in the day, all of a sudden, pop! went our electricity. Backup power systems begin their haunting siren song desirous of renewed power. Those of us on the second floor begin the power-down process, then I head downstairs to do the same for our servers… at which point I notice that no one on the first floor is freaking out or doing anything… and the lights are on.
Blinking and doubling back, I confirm the scenario: 1st floor fine, 2nd floor not so much. Which makes me think that our patchwork quilt electrical system has finally given out upstairs. I immediately contact just about all electricians within a 20 mile radius until one agrees to head over.
After a full sweep, it turns out that a single master disconnect became… disconnected. Inside a wall. Now what could have made something inside of the wall suddenly move… WAITAMOMENT! Call FEMA – that earthquake did us in. For a couple of hours. Only on the second floor. And we passed the time playing Wii in the conference room on the first floor. OK, so it wasn’t a national emergency. But I know that quake had it in for me.
