Last night San Diego suffered the worst power outage it has ever seen. An "operator error" in Arizona led to the shutdown of the electricity feed coming into San Diego from the east. This loss of power caused an overload at the power plant to the north, killing all electricity flow into all of California south of San Onofre. 1.5 million "customers" without power, or approximately 5 million people, for almost 12 hours.

Funny things happen in modern society when the power goes out. First there is dread and idle anticipation as everyone waits for it to return. As time passes, panic sets in. I immediately turned to Twitter to see just how widespread the outage was. I realized pretty quickly just how huge this was when I started seeing tweets from all over the entire county, from Oceanside down to Chula Vista, and as far east as Yuma & Coachella. An outage that large was sure to take hours.

After panic comes acceptance and preparation. I went around and turned off all the power strips leading to major electronics, in preparation for the inevitable power surge. Kat and I both found books to read and we settled down for a few hours of tedium. With the 100º weather bearing down outside it was important to stay as still as possible to keep from overheating. In the first hour the temperature in the house climbed six degrees, we knew it was going to get hot.

Near evening we started looking for food that we could cook on the stove alone. Not knowing how long the power would be out, we didn't want to open the fridge and let the contents warm up. We're moving to a new house in a month and we've been deliberately trying to use up the food in the pantry, so options were scarce. Kat finally settled on some stovetop stuffing, which actually was really good.

With the sun setting we realized just how under-prepared we were for such an emergency. We only have two flashlights in the house, and one of them had a dead 6v battery (who keeps spare 6vs?). Kat hates candles and had purged many of the ones I had before, but thankfully I found two squirreled away in a cabinet. After a few minutes of that, we decided we needed to get out of the house and see what was going on.

Driving around in a city that is alive without power is a strange thing, with nothing to do, people took to the streets. Our neighborhood was full of people walking or riding bikes, and when we got into the shopping area there were packs of people roaming the sidewalks, the only light for their path coming from the cars on the road and the moon in the sky. Buildings were completely dark in a way that felt totally unnatural. You never really think about just how much light a closed business puts out until it no longer is. Entire shopping centers vanish into the night, only visible when a car headlight reflects off a dead sign.

With the loss of power, all stop lights were running on battery backups and operating in emergency mode. Anyone who actually paid attention during drivers education knows this means it's a four-way stop. Sadly, a lot of drivers in SoCal didn't pay attention, and every major intersection was a nightmare. San Diegans are especially known for being awful with 4-way stops. We decided to make a full loop around Poway, only making right turns to avoid trying to cross major intersections. As we passed the Target shopping center, Kat said she thought she saw some light, so we pulled into the parking lot and found it full of cars! People were streaming in and out of Target and Albertsons, which miraculously still had power.

Shopping during an emergency is very surreal. Only emergency lighting was running, so the store was very dim. Every person we passed in line at the registers had carts full of whatever food they could find. A woman standing behind the registers was directing customers to all the important sections of the store, and informing people of what supplies they still had in stock (flashlights were long gone, but batteries and candles were still available). Thankfully the store still had an active internet connection and was able to run credit cards, otherwise I think people would have been much worse off. We grabbed a few snacks and an extra candle and made our purchases. As we were walking out the security guard was standing outside telling people the store was now closed and they couldn't get in. No refuge here, the supplies have been taken. We got back in our car and headed home.

My laptop was thankfully fully charged; our cell phones, not so much. After several hours of constantly pinging Twitter for updates, we rather quickly depleted our charges. I used our one car charger to give mine enough juice to last through the night, and then forced myself to only use it every half hour. When we got home we broke out our snacks and sat down in front of the glow of my MBP to watch the only video I had on the hard drive… My Little Pony. After a couple of episodes we decided to take a shower (by candle light) and head to bed.

I am not an easy sleeper, the slightest sounds wake me up. To battle this, I sleep with at a minimum of one bedside fan running to produce white-noise and keep airflowing across my face. Without this vital resource, I cannot sleep. Between the ringing in my ears, the sounds of traffic, my wife and dog snoring and the gurgles and pops of my own digestive system I have no choice but to lay there completely wide awake, staring into the darkness. Because of the summer heat, our bedroom is completely sealed up, the window can't even be opened, so the air in the room sits dead. After a few minutes of that I remembered that I had a small battery powered fan in the utility room. I loaded it up with a couple AAs and set it running next to the bed. This gave enough marginal airflow that at least I wasn't sweltering on the sheets, but no where near enough noise to cover up the sounds of the evening. After two hours the batteries died and I didn't feel like putting in new ones.

At 12:30am SDG&E tweeted that power was restored to parts of Poway. An hour and a half later the fans in the room came to life; within moments I was asleep.

I am immensely thankful for modern technology today. If it weren't for my smart phone and Twitter, we would have had no clue what was happening last night or had any hope for the restoration. I have huge respect for both AT&T and SDG&E for their efforts last night in keeping information flowing thru-ought the county; ATT for their quick response to the situation and getting towers back up and running when battery backups started to fail, and SDG&E for their rapid response (they initially thought it would be well into Friday before everything was running again) and their excellent use of social networking to keep the public informed.

Huge thanks to all those men and women who worked tirelessly into the night to restore service to the people of San Diego. I also am immensely thankful to Target and Albertsons for being the only stores in town with the foresight to have backup power so they can continue to serve the community in an emergency.

Went looking for information on this today to link to someone and couldn't find anything recent, so I figured I'd write one up myself. Here's a simple process for getting a 100% legal copy of IE9 running on your mac using disk images provided by Microsoft themselves.

1. Download and install a copy of virtualbox, it's a free virtualization program like VMWare or Parallels. Make sure you have the command line utilities checked in the installer.

2. Download the official Microsoft Application Compatibility Virtual PC Image for IE9. As of this writing the latest versions are as of August 16th, 2011. The IE9 image is a seven part self extracting RAR file. Images are also available for IE7 and IE8. This image contains a fully legal copy of Microsoft Windows 7, licensed for developer debugging use in a virtual machine only.

3. Use unrar (installed via macports or homebrew) or The Unarchiver to extra the multipart archive. This will result in two files: Windows 7.vhd and Windows 7.vmc. You can discard the vmc file.

4. Open the terminal and cd to the directory you extracted the vhd file into. Run the following command:

   VBoxManage clonehd "Windows 7.vhd" Windows_7_IE9.vdi

5. Move the resulting .vdi file into a safe location. By default VirtualBox puts its disk images in a unique folder inside ~/VirtualBox VMs, but I prefer them to be on a separate disk partition.

6. Launch VirtualBox and click the New button on the toolbar (or select New… from the Machine menu). This will launch the new virtual machine wizard. Name the machine however you want and select Windows 7 from the Operating System Version menu.

   

7. VirtualBox will allocate 512MB by default, which in my experience is enough for basic web testing, you may wish to give it more.

   

8. When prompted for the hard disk, choose "Use existing hard disk" and click on the browse icon to the right of the menu. Find the Windows_7_IE9.vdi file that we created in step 4. Click through the remaining dialog panes and finish the wizard.

   
   

9. Due to an incompatibility with VirtualBox and VirtualPC, this disk image will Bluescreen when you attempt to launch it, so there is one more thing that has to be changed to get it working. Select the new virtual machine and click on the Settings button. Switch to the Storage tab. By default VirtualBox places the boot media on the SATA controller; you need to move it to the IDE controller.

   

   Do this by selecting the IDE controller and choosing Add Hard Disk from the plus button menu. Select the .vdi file from the list and click OK. Now remove that same drive from the SATA Controller by selecting it and clicking the minus button. Click OK.

10. Select your newly made Windows 7 virtual machine and click Start.

11. When you get to the windows login screen, choose Administrator. The login password is "Password1"

12. Windows will tell you that the copy you are using is non-genuine. Microsoft does not issue valid keys with these images, as they are intended to be temporary, and their official stance is to just reset the disk image when the trial expires (seriously, it's in that link above).

    

    Click cancel on the activation dialog box so it takes you to the desktop. Double click on the Command Prompt icon and type in the following:

    slmgr –rearm

    This command resets the genuine advantage countdown timer to 30 days so that it will stop bugging you every time you launch it. Unfortunately, Windows Security Essentials will continue to bug you about it, so feel free to disable that. A dialog will popup telling you to restart, but we don't want to do that yet.

13. Press the command key to get Windows to release your mouse, and choose "Install Guest Additions" from the Devices menu in Virtualbox. Windows will popup an AutoPlay confirmation, click "Run VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe". An installer will launch, click through all the dialogs. When Windows Security prompts for permission, click Install.

    

    Finally, when it asks to restart, let it.

14. The final step is optional, and that's to enable to auto-login feature so you don't have to enter the password every time you launch the machine. This article on MSDN will show you how to do that.

Congratulations, you now have a 100% legal copy of IE9 on your Mac. These disk images are valid for 3 months from the date they were made (The August 2011 images expire November 17, 2011). You will need to repeat this process for the new images when they come out.

If you need to configure Windows for any local virtualhosts, the file you need is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts (note, you need to be an Administrator to save the file), and the IP to forward to is 10.0.2.2 (which is also localhost).

The August 2011 IE9 disk image also comes preinstalled with Google Chrome, Firefox 4, Adobe Flash 10.2, and a hand-full of other useful development tools.

linxeh: I dont see the point in battling against SVN or similar now git is ubiqutous (and powerful)
deryl: SVN is wanna-be git on drugs
deryl: bad drugs
linxeh: well, it was better than much else at the time
linxeh: at least it supported changesets
FylGood: SVN is kinda like Nethandrahal man, just becoming upright, but definitely lacking in many ways.
chiper: SVN is like the salt & pepper shakers, and git is a full spice rack
chiper: for some people, a little salt is all it needs
ibiwan: so where's CVS and VSS fit into your analogy?
chiper: ibiwan: salt & pepper has to come from somewhere
ibiwan: I think CVS must be a bowl of peppercorns
chiper: indeed
ibiwan: and VSS is a beautiful crystal vial of powdered dog shit
chiper: ibiwan: that costs $50 per gram
FylGood: Next time I'm in a job interview, if they ask me to tell them about my experience with CVS… I'll just say "it's basically a bowl of peppercorns". :p
chiper: haha
ibiwan: and there's only one peppermill for the whole table, and it must be washed out and let air dry between uses
FylGood: ibiwan: and I would say that if two people try to grab the peppermill at the same time…. (you fill in the rest)
ibiwan: FylGood: it explodes and gets pepper in everyone's eyes
ibiwan: in comparison, SVN is downright modern and developer-friendly
FylGood: lol
ibiwan: even the ones who weren't reaching for it
ibiwan: and it's STILL better than VSS

From #macosx@freenode.

Just submitted the following feedback to Apple.

Using the quick lookup feature (three finger tap, or "Lookup" from the contextual menu) in applications that predate Lion results in dictionary popups that cannot be dismissed. The word gains the yellow highlight, the popup appears. Clicking anywhere in the field causes the word to lose highlight, but the popup remains. The only way to dismiss the popup is to close the window.

Certain words appear to be more prone to this than others. I can reproduce it 100% of the time with the spelling "cigaret", or even the word "hello".

Apps I've tried this in and reproduced it: Linkinus, Adium, Transmit, Chocolat, Unison, Twitter

I am unable to reproduce it in any Apple applications (I tried Mail, Stickies, Finder, Safari, Address Book)

Originally posted on reddit in reply to the following:

Have you quit in the past/for good? Why? If you returned, why did you return?

I've taken a break after every expansion release. After BC I stopped playing during the grind to 70 on my first toon. I had been raiding for about 3 months already and I just got sick of my main. The old world still sucked at that point and I didn't feel like leveling another toon, so I lost interest in the game. I don't remember exactly how long that break was, but I know I didn't come back till after 2.1 came out.

For Wrath my BC guild dove straight into the content and we made good progress. We were clearing Naxx, but not flawlessly, thanks to numerous weak links in our 25 man group. When Ulduar landed we made decent progress on 10 man, but again the 25 just kept running into issues and rarely even got to the watchers. Week after week of always doing the same first bosses got very boring, and once again I left to play other games.

I came back when 3.2 came out and we started working on ToC, but I started playing less and less from that point on, as I was now working a fulltime 9-5 job with a 2 hour daily commute. Two months before 3.3 came out I married my girlfriend of 4 years. Being married and working full time ate into my schedule a lot, and I simply couldn't do the late night raiding as much as I used to. This made it harder to get into raids, since I often could only come for one or two nights a week. I stopped playing again for another 3 months, returning when the 4.0.1 patch came back so I could take advantage of the end-of-expansion heavy hitting to finally see all the content I missed out on before.

When Cata came out I left my old guild and joined a new one founded by a friend. Things were running great at first and we were enjoying the 5 man content, but pressure from work left me getting off later and later, and by the time I signed on no-one in the guild would still be on. The difficulty of the new content made it much more difficult to find other players skilled enough to pull it off, so even on weekends we weren't able to get raids together. I stopped playing simply because:

1. I had nothing to do and no one around to do it with, and you can only level new characters so far.
2. It became too difficult to dedicate an entire evening to playing the game without interruption.
3. The new player attitudes that were starting to appear in LFD made pugging into an infuriating experience that often wasn't worth the time.
4. I gradually shifted into other games, namely Minecraft and Team Fortess 2.

It's probably been 4 months since I last signed into my WoW account, and I have been thinking lately I should get in there and disable auto-renew before my next 6 month period comes up.

I don't blame Blizzard at all, as I don't think any single action they've taken has made the game less fun. There is no way they could have foreseen the player behaviors that would appear as a result of the Random LFD tool. The tool is an ingenious addition to the game and does make the content more accessible, the flaws are in the human element. The other factors are the result of changes in my own life and my own priorities.

I know I will some day play the game again… I'm still regularly reading mmo-champion and keeping up on the latest updates, but my life hasn't changed, and my time will only become more segmented when my wife and I start having kids. I've accepted that I probably wont log into the game again until the next expansion, when new leveling content appears.