Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’ve been separated from the world of personal computing for a while now because of a recent natural disaster that struck home. On Sunday, September 14, the remnants of hurricane Ike swept across Ohio with a ferocity unforeseen by weather forecasters and Dayton took quite a beating. At one point Sunday evening, as many as 300,000 residents were without power, and I’m still one of them.

As of today, September 19, my home and my neighborhood still have no power. I’m at a friend’s house borrowing power and an internet connection for the evening. There are conflicting rumors and no real information about when power will be restored, although all rumors indicate it will be well into next week. Luckily gas lines are underground, so I’ve had hot water all week which makes living in a powerless house inconvenient at worst. Had the weather been something other than our typical September mildness, I would likely have had to abandon the house for the week to find heat or AC.

At the beginning of the outage, the extent of the damage was not apparent to those who hadn’t left home. Gas stations that did have power sold out of gas. Groceries and convenience stores that were open had no ice. D-cell batters were nowhere to be found. Restaurants that had power were packed by hungry people with no power to cook their own food. Traffic lights were out and every intersection became a 4-way stop. With the exception of a few isolated areas, the city was completely dark and more than a little dangerous and creepy.

Ohio has floods and tornadoes. Usually those kinds of natural disasters are comparatively small scale. Hurricane remnants pass over Ohio from time to time and result in severe thunderstorms at worst. This time, a combination of factors turned this remnant into a disaster that affected a large swath of the state.

Some of the people here without power are getting very frustrated because the power company, DP&L, has take a defensive stance and hasn’t communicated well, probably because they don’t have much to communicate. I have no doubt that lineman and tree removers are working themselves to exhaustion, but I get the impression that the effort is a scramble rather than an organized march toward service restoration. Given the choice, I guess DP&L would rather seem defensive than disorganized. Pick your poison.

We get our variety of crazy weather here and I’ve seen a bunch of it, but this has to be the worst I’ve seen, and with the longest lasting effects. I have pictures and video I’ll post when I have an opportunity. The worst damage to my property is some downed tree limbs, but others have had entire tree trunks crash into their homes or the wind ripped off significant pieces of their siding or roof. It has been a frustrating inconvenience for me, but for others it has been a genuine loss of significant proportions.

I know some of my readers also live in Dayton. Do you have any outage experiences to share in the comments section?

I’m aware of Microsoft’s new ad campaign, but I have not made the effort to see any of the new commercials. Considering that I am unfamiliar with the commercials’ content beyond what I have read on the web, I offer the following:

Microsoft has accepted the premise that the Mac is a serious competitor to Windows that needs to be dealt with. Microsoft is in a position where it feels the need to react, indicating weakness. Vista, if only from the perspective of perception, has been a disaster and Microsoft is trying to stop the bleeding.

Microsoft has either misinterpreted the content of Apple’s ads or has purposely decided to portray them disingenuously in order to supply a twist to their response. Microsoft’s ads feature users who declare they are a PC, and are the antithesis of John Hodgman’s PC character. Apple, on the other hand, portrays Hodgman and Long as personifications of the systems themselves, not the systems’ respective users. Microsoft has made their ad campaign personal, whereas Apple’s is personified.

Of course, Apple did have an ad campaign that was about users some years back, and those users were impugned in every imaginable way. If memory serves, the fact that more of those users leaned toward Hodgman rather than Long was the basis of many public personal insults, but I digress.