Month: August 2004

A ton of batteries

My boss and I just finished installing 1300 pounds of extra batteries for our server room’s UPS* units, more than doubling our previous backup coverage.

See, the power company has decided they need to cut power to our block for 8 hours tomorrow night in order to do work on the local grid. And here we were with only enough battery power for 2½-3 hours. (This was more than enough back in the era of rolling blackouts, since those only lasted an hour or so.) We can shut down everything on the inside network, no problem… but a five-hour outage for all the websites, email accounts, dialups, DSL accounts, etc. that we host is not something we want to be stuck with.

So we got more batteries.

We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

* That’s uninterruptable power supply, not united parcel service.

Lactic Acid: A Good Thing?

Heard a story on KCRW this morning. Apparently lactic acid might not be responsible for muscle fatigue after all (as my high school biology class taught). The connection was made because lactic acid was found in fatigued muscles, but recent research suggests that it may prevent muscle fatigue. It turns out that if lactic acid is removed from overworked muscle fibers, they actually stop working.

Of course, it is probably responsible for the burn you get while exerting.

(It’s kind of like when I learned that a fever was actually an immune system technique to fight infection, and not something the infection did itself.)

Current Mood: 😕curious