Island of light

Just the two of us engulfed in the warm Island of golden glow emanating from a solitary electric lamp. The rest is just an ocean of darkness. An occasional invisible clouds moves aside to let a shimmer of star light pass through, I am re-reading “Forward the Foundation” she is re-reading “The Last Leaf”

How romantic you would say, but NO!! it is not when you are sitting there not by choice but by compulsion of a 7 hour power cut and all the back-up power you have garnered for the worst possible situations is exhausted. Not to mention the mosquitoes eating you alive!

Two consecutive mishaps at the major power stations and the entire region has been crippled. The situation is not expected to improve for at least 10 more days…

Looks like we will have to be entirely self dependent for all our power needs. Gives burning money an entire new meaning 🙁

  • Depending on how much money you are burning, you might want to evaluate if getting laptops with multiple batteries (rotated/charged) + your usual UPS would be more cost effective. Also, you could carry them around and probably sit in a cafe + a reliance mobile to be online if you ever get that desperate.

    • Batteries require electricity to charge them….

      • Yeah, so on normal days, laptop batteries and the UPS would take about 3 hrs to charge. When you dont have power, use up the UPS power (~1-2 hrs I suppose) then the main as well as the spare battery (~8-10 hrs). 9 + 2 = 11 hrs. Thats the worse you have seen right?

        • The UPS takes 12 hours to fully charge after being completely drained – plus we do not have any laptops 😛

          • Vaibhav is right, you know. Laptops are dirt cheap now, and so is bandwidth. Maintaining a fully-powered office with a huge UPSs seems contra-indicative when a 50K laptop and a cheap phone let you work from anywhere. And especially the lind of work you do, which doesnt really need serious horsepower in the machine.

            Once upon a time, desktops were standard, laptops only for speciality work/people. These days, I would say that unless you can justify the desktop, a laptop makes more sense.

            The fact that modern laptops let you work an entire day on battery alone justifies it. The fact that you can charge one set of batteries elsewhere (where/when there *is* power) while using another set in your laptop makes even more sense.

            Consider it. IAC you have been playing with the idea of a laptop for years – the current power situation may be just the final justification you need.