Month: June 2004

Nanofire

A bit of excitement at work today. There was a small electrical fire over the weekend. Fortunately someone was working on Saturday, noticed one of the servers wasn’t responding, went into the server room and saw the plug on a heavy-duty extension cord glowing slightly, with smoke coming out. He unplugged it from the wall, made sure it went out, then rearranged some power cords so he could get back to work.

We’ve bypassed the UPS involved until we can be absolutely sure that (a) it didn’t cause the short and (b) it wasn’t damaged. There’s charring on the outside of the plug where it was in contact with the extension cord, though nothing like what we found inside the other plug. The hot wire had burned clean through, leaving charcoal dust all over the inside of the plug. The cable and the circuit breaker are both rated for 20 amps, so the most likely explanation (since the UPS wasn’t belching flames) is that the cable was faulty – and an extension cord is a lot easier to replace than a 130-lb power supply!

You know you’ve picked the right person when…

I was just looking through web traffic statistics for K-Squared Ramblings, had just finished reading the top 20 search terms people were finding us with, and started on the list of individual pages linking to the site. I muttered “Ah, direct hits,” and then, at the same time, alenxa and I both started saying “Krakow! Krakow!” (old “Calvin and Hobbes” joke).

Does this sound remotely familiar?

alenxa and I were driving back from lunch when something reminded me of David Bowie’s “A Space Oddity.” This in turn reminded me of a previous conversation — with somebody — about a story or story idea I had read or thought of. The key issue here was the repeated “Major Tom” theme. There are at least the two songs, and I recall hearing that there is at least one more somewhere.

Anyway, the story idea was this: suppose there was some seriously traumatic event – maybe not 9/11 level, maybe more like Challenger, or any of several celebrities who died before their time – that everyone knew about, and everyone was affected by. Now suppose that all memories and records of this event disappeared. But it’s still sitting there, in the back of people’s minds, and every once in a while there’s a song, or a TV movie, or something about this event that no one remembers really happened.

Imagine “Candle in the Wind” without Marilyn Monroe, for instance. Or imagine that an early astronaut really did drift off into space to be lost, and no one remembers Major Tom except a few songwriters, and even they don’t realize they’re remembering his story and not making it up.

Has anyone read a story like this? If not, would anyone like to?