Grrr aargh PEPCO

I suppose I can't blame everything on PEPCO. Some of it I must blame on the weather.

My apologies, folks. Yesterday's awesome rush-hour storms -- when the leading edge of the front rolled over, the clouds looked like the wrath of an angry god headed south to the District to kick a little ass -- knocked out power locally for about 4 hours.

While I do have good battery backup UPS in place here, there's a limit to how much that can handle, and for how long it can handle it. Once the first 15 minutes goes by, my main concern is to have already shut down my servers in a safe way, leaving up only the nameserver for so long as its own internal batteries can handle.

PEPCO occasionally does something really annoying. That would be turning the power back on, leaving it on for about half an hour, and then turning it off and on and off and on. This sort of thing often means that I have to spend much of the next day fixing server brokenness. Sure, if I was rich, I'd have backup servers just sitting there ready to swap into place. Then again, if I was rich, I'd have a two-ton pile of batteries in a code-approved outbuilding, complete with its own gas-turbine generator with an output in the 150-kW range. But I digress.

PEPCO having been nice enough to have left the power on for the last few hours, I fixed some brokenness and now you may once again use AspenHillNet.Net and it should work just fine. If it doesn't, gripe about it here.

---

Astute Readers may be wondering where this blog had disappeared to, and it's easily explained.

The old URL was "campaign.thomashardman.com" and that just doesn't accurately reflect my intentions here.

I will definitely feel free to critique policy and politics here in District 4 in particular, in Montgomery in general, and of course I shall continue to endeavor to give free lessons that combine proper constructions in English Grammar and Rhetoric with additional lessons on how to use grammar and rhetoric to bore people out of their minds with the blogger equivalent of a guitar player noodling a riff for hours at a time.

What I won't be doing -- much -- will be running for political office. I gave it my best shot, three years running, and oddly enough I feel sufficiently beholden to those kind people who actually voted for me. I can generally have no idea who they might be, and so I can only assume that at least some of them voted for me because they liked positions I put forward in the campaigns. I didn't say anything in the campaigns in which I had no true belief or feeling. I will continue to support defense of the environment, stabilization of population, and easing of traffic congestion. I will also continue to agitate for increasing law-enforcement pressure on criminal aliens and I will continue to press for increasing controls on out-of-control subculture that promotes crime and violence.

I just won't be doing it as a political campaign, unless perhaps some rare sane faction of the local Democrat party decides it's willing to fund and promote a very Centrist candidate who is more focused on the long view than on scrambling around after the exigencies of the moment.

I will just be blogging a bit, some days or weeks I'll be doing it more than others. Hence the change of name of the blog URL.

It's not necessary, though it would be nice, for other bloggers who link here to go ahead and change their links. The ultimate proper link would be to "thomashardman.blogspot.com" which will always redirect to whatever I'm calling this blog. In the meanwhile, I have installed a HTTP Redirect at my nameserver and webserver to send anyone asking for campaign.thomashardman.com to blog.thomashardman.com and it should be all automatic and transparent to the user.