Blackouts.

[Steve in Pudsey]

lost power at work today at around 3:30 - it's destined to be off until 6:30 (surrounding town and villages were apparently also without power - bits seemed to be, but i don't go home via the backroads), but i'm just going to go in early plug everything in again (we've had some powercuts before and when the power comes back a few things have got fried... i really don't want to have my christmas holiday cancelled to rebuild a server)

it's quite scary that the phone system completely died, there was a dialtone, but no external line... i will speak to somebody about that, still at least i went home early... it's amazing how quickly the place went cold.

You don't work at BBC Bristol do you?

Last time we had a power cut at work the emergency lighting failed. That was fun...

[cdd]

Had a powercut only last night, for about 20 mins at 2 AM. The internet (Virgin Media) died a couple of minutes before the blackout and still hasn't returned - a coincidence?

Anyway,

[Steve in Pudsey]

Virgin probably need to come and reset something in the cabinet in the street which is probably served from the same power supply. Unfortunately until they get several calls from people they will assume it's your equipment that has a fault and attempt to schedule an engineer visit.

[nwtv2003]

Had a powercut only last night, for about 20 mins at 2 AM. The internet (Virgin Media) died a couple of minutes before the blackout and still hasn't returned - a coincidence?

Anyway,

That hasn't happened to us for years now luckily, on one occassion we had a power cut of about a minute at 7.30pm, it came back on, but the TV, which was then Analogue Cable didn't come back until 11pm IIRC.

There have been times when the power's been fine but we've lost Cable totally for hours on end, even if you do phone Virgin they just say an engineer is working in whatever postcode you are in.

When we've been on "reduced power", we have no Internet at all and the TV gets no further than the reboot Virgin Media logo, although I've been told leaving your TV and computer on at this time isn't a good idea.

[stu]

Talking of cable blackouts, I remember back in 1995 or so a heavy rainstorm covered the old Cable Midlands region and each channel went off one by one. Much fun was had by all watching the mosaic channel, it was like the traffic control room out of the Italian Job!

[Jason]

The last time we had a black out was in October last year. They had been digging up the road further up and because the silly idiots forgot cover up their work properly, the rain from that night got though and half of the street was in the dark for three hours.