The night the lights went out
I experienced another first tonight. With about 15 minutes left to go in the Sopranos I lose power. No this isn’t the first time in my life that I’ve ever been in a power failure. I was without power for 3 days back when hurricane Georges struck back in 1998. This is the first time that I’ve experienced a region wide power failure. It was similar to what happened in the north east. A transformer tower at the power plant in Sterlington caught fire around 7:30. It triggered an emergency shutdown of the power grid. According to one fire dept representative, Entergy wasn’t made aware of the grid failure until the fire department arrived responding to the fire. Needless to say, there was a blackout stretching from West Monroe to well past the Monroe Airport. According to a local radio station, people were driving like lunatics. Lauren called me and told me that people all down HWY165 were disregarding intersections. KNOE AM and FM were knocked off the air somehow. I believe the transmitter lost power because the studios are supported by a backup diesel generator. I’ll find out why AM/FM failed tomorrow. So tonight if only for two hours, I experienced a little piece of what they went through in the north east.
Blogging from work
Since the domain should have been transferred over by now, I’m going to go ahead and post my first real blog. I’ve been having problems with eHost and eNom transferring the domain’s nameservers. For some reason I used an old email address for the administrative contact for BrendanSpaar.com and even though a current address is listed on every other contact for the domain, they are unable to help me until that change is made. As soon as the change is made, I’m going to be transferring the domain away from eNom and eHost not because of this situation but because my new host is offering me a free year added to the life of the domain if I switch.
I spent all last week at home mostly working on the website. I visited with some friends and relaxed out by the pool reading Harry Potter. Saturday I came home and unpacked everything. I was able to pick up an awesome package that was delivered last week while I was away. I’ll break the suspense in a later post. Saturday I saw something REALLY crazy. I have been leaving my window blinds open on my bedroom window to get some natural sunlight in my room. I occasionally glance outside and see what’s going on. I saw a man appear out of nowhere in the parking lot across the street. There is sort of an incline so I could not see him exactly. He appeared to be floating around. He came up to the street and attempted to cross the street. It was then that I realized he was riding a SEGWAY! I couldn’t believe it! That’s the first segway encounter I’ve ever had personally. I’ve seen them on TV but never in person.
Saturday night was interesting. It was game 2 of the New Orleans Saints preseason football. KNOE AM broadcasts the Saints games with a 2 hour pregame and 3 hour post. Fast Eddie was running the board that night. I came up to the station about 15 minutes prior to the game and made sure everything was good to go and left my cell phone number with him. Around 11:30pm the satellite feed drops out and I get a call. There is a phone number to call and have the feed dropped in over the phone but the number is out of New Orleans. The phones in the studio don’t have long distance service. Acting on instinct we went above and beyond. Eddie dialed up the New Orleans number on his cell phone and got it ready to go. He then patched the feed through to the studio using 3-way calling on his cell. In the end, we were able to put the last 15 minutes of the post game on the air thanks to some quick thinking.
I should get back to work now. Work means reading Harry Potter. Hopefully you will be able to read this post before school starts back.
