misc

Wow, it’s really quiet when the power is out

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We had a quiet, relaxing, electricity-free evening last night thanks to a 5 and a half hour power outage in our neighborhood.

It was remarkable how quiet it was in the house without all the white noise we are used to: the bubbling of the aquarium, the hum of the refrigerator and the air conditioning, etc. My daughter found the whole thing entertaining and proposed the idea that we should have one electricity-free evening every month (candles, flashlights, no TV, etc.). I think we’re actually going to try that.

From the tech side of outage: I run NUT on my Ubuntu server that hosts windracer.net so I know the UPS switched over to battery at 4:52pm yesterday afternoon when the outage started because upsmon sent me an e-mail. At the same time, Nagios started reporting (also via e-mail) that my office printer, my TiVo HD, and wireless bridge were down. Those are in a different room so I knew it was the entire house without power and not just the circuit to the computer closet. 15 minutes later, NUT gracefully shut down my NAS (a Buffalo LinkStation 250 running the OpenLink firmware), and then the server itself as the UPS reached a low-battery state. I’m using a 750VA UPS in the closet to power the modem, router, NAS, and server, and NUT reports only a 40% load for a 14 minute battery run-time. That seems a little low so I might need to look into replacing that unit. Everything booted up normally when the power came back on at 10:18pm.

Before upgrading the server to Hardy Heron two weeks ago, my uptime record was 135 days. So much for my own personal five 9s of uptime. 😀

Summer alarm sales "scam"

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Not technically a scam, but still something that I consider to be shady business practice …

This evening I had a young college-age kid knock on my door wearing an Apex Security polo with an official-looking badge on a lanyard around his neck. He had seen the ADT sign in my front yard and basically starting giving me the lowdown on a new Honeywell security system to replace my current one.

He explained that criminals knew alarm systems used the phone line so would always cut the phone line first before breaking into a home (“maybe you’ve seen that on the news or in movies like ‘The Bourne Identity’, cool movie” he said). This Honeywell system he was pitching used GSM cellular so it was always in contact with home base (“except we have better signal than regular cellular”). He had just installed one for my “neighbors down the street.”

Then he started talking about how Honeywell would be through my neighborhood in the next few months “upgrading” systems for free, he wanted to put a sign for my yard, and I started getting more suspicious. I seemed to recall reading/hearing about door-to-door alarm sales “scams.” Once I started getting that vibe I ended his pitch saying I would do my own research, thanks for stopping by, etc.

After he left I immediately called ADT to speak with a representative and of course they had heard about Apex and their door-to-door sales pitches. The rep told me that yes, they’re a legitimate business, they (ADT) don’t approve of their tactics, but there’s nothing they can really do about it. A few Google searches about Apex, APX, etc. turns up a lot of info on the company. Apparently they’re part of the summer alarm sales “industry” and college students can earn “good money” selling these systems for companies like Apex. They tend to downplay the Apex part and stress known brands like Honeywell or GE.

I can’t fault them (the college kids) for that, but I do disagree with their (Apex’s) hard-sell scare tactics. I can easily see the elderly in my neighborhood falling for this method (I found a local article from last summer where that actually happened). I also found this interesting blog on the subject.

Just a heads up … watch out for these guys.