Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

from sea to shining sea

It’s funny how, in this networked world, a massive power outage in Los Angeles can have a big impact on the East Coast.

A big impact to me, at least. This afternoon’s blackout in L.A. knocked out service to Dreamhost, my webhost, effectively killing all my Web sites and e-mail access for the better part of the afternoon.

Actually, I learned about the blackout from Dreamhost. When my e-mail suddenly died and I couldn’t reconnect, I checked out the separate off-site status page they set up a while back to keep customers informed in the event of a major outage (the page was set up after a massive DDOS attack took them down several months ago). The status message mentioned the blackout, which in turn led me to pull up latimes.com, which had very little in the way of details by that time.

(I didn’t even know that Dreamhost was based in L.A. until today. I knew it was somewhere on the West Coast, but so long as my Web site was up and I could get to my e-mail, it didn’t really occur to me to wonder where the actual servers lived — until today.)

I spent much of the rest of my afternoon reloading the Dreamhost status page and the L.A. Times story every few minutes, hoping for more information — and maybe a sign of hope that my webhosting account would be back up sometime soon. I normally wouldn’t be so obsessed about a power outage several thousand miles away, but it’s funny how jittery I can get when I’m separated from my e-mail.