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I encountered perhaps the weirdest issues I’ve had with electrical service in my life yesterday.

Yesterday morning I was woken up by the sound of the battery-backed power supply for the computer beeping, indicating that it was running off of battery power. But then it would stop beeping and return to normal. At first I thought that the power supply was failing so I turned off the computer and unplugged the power supply.

Since I was up I went to the bathroom and turned on the light, and noticed that the light was flickering. In fact, every light in the apartment that I tried was flickering. So what was apparently happening to the power supply was that the voltage being supplied to the house was fluctuating, and the power supply was having to rapidly cycle being suppling battery power and using the main apartment power.

The power eventually went out just before I left for work, and when I came back a couple of hours later, things had been restored.

So, OK, just some sort of weird hiccup in the grid, which the power company would repair and that would be that, right? Nope. :-) The same problem kept repeating throughout the day. My wife and I left to run errands and when we came back it looked like the power was out again. Luckily I checked the circuit breaker, because it turned out that another power fluctuation had caused it to trip, but power had already been restored. That was the only other time we lost power, but it continued to fluctuate throughout the day and night.

Today we haven’t had any problems with the power, luckily. I’m hoping the power company has figured out whatever the hiccup was.

I get to leave soon for my first patrol with my ship. I have to say that the engine room (and basically the entire boat) is much much bigger than the one I qualified on at Prototype. :-) On my first patrol I’ll have to qualify for a few watchstations, including the ever-important Engineering Officer of the Watch. Unfortunately those who are not qualified are pretty much expected not to take up too much rest time so I guess I won’t need to pack my computer or any movies.

Posted by mpyne under Navy & Personal | 2 Comments »

Hi all. Just wanted to let you all know that as of revision 593817, kdesvn-build supports using the progress output of CMake 2.4.3, just like it used to do with unsermake.

So you should be able to get progress output support again. You may have to use --refresh-build switch to do so however, as merely upgrading CMake to 2.4.3 and running make again didn’t change cmake’s output.

Also in the news: North Korea has successfully tested a nuclear weapon, and basically set the entire south east Asian region on edge. :-(

Posted by mpyne under KDE | No Comments »

It is rather shocking how rotten to the core the GOP leadership in the House of Representatives is. You can read about it by Googling about the Mark Foley scandal, and I’ve already mentioned it besides.

Basically all of the House GOP leaders not named Hastert are trying to pin the blame on Rep. Hastert. Rep. Hastert, on the other hand, is blaming the Congressional pages (and Democrats, of course, who hadn’t even been informed about the emails) for leaking the IMs (guess the pages got the GOP back for covering it up, eh?)

For some reason most of the normal Republican crusaders for children’s safety are strangely silent on the issue, including Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly. What a bunch of spineless weasels, they don’t even want to hold the House leadership accountable for not investigating the first email because they’re so scared that the Democrats will take control of the House this year.

Posted by mpyne under Political | 9 Comments »