Including the work on circadian clocks in fruitflies by an old friend. I'm glad she managed to lose only about 6 weeks of work. When hurricane Fran hit Raleigh back in 1996, I lost 6 months!
This is precisely why redundant power is so critical.
Our office provides some critical items like open meeting notices, rules and regulations filings, Central Voter Registration System, etc.
When we were relocating I mentioned that redundant power was critical. We put in an APC Symmetra UPS and a Cummins natural gas fired generator. We NEVER lose power.
However our DNS services are provided by another agency and when their power goes out, nobody can get to any of our resources. All is not lost though, they're installing their own generator now - we were the inspiration for that one.
Once upon a previous lifetime, back in the day, I worked at/with/for an up-and-coming Internet biz. Our main data center had path-diverse redundant power feeds directly from substations of the regional power company. We had a generator that could power my hometown. We test-started the generator periodically. And yet my pager awakened me in the middle of a stormy night with the news that our data center had lost power.
The generator didn't start. Its software control system failed just when we needed it.
It was really, really fun to inform the customers who had been promised that our power could never fail.
The moral of that story? Addressing the easily-predicted failure modes might make it more likely that one will experience the more bizarre failure modes. Or, forget ye not the Law of Murphy.
Immediately after Fran, they built a new animal facility on campus with triple power backup. Through hurricanes, ice storms and every other disaster imaginable, my experiments hummed on. One winter there was deep snow - something for which NC towns are not prepared for - and since I lived across the street from campus, I dug a canal in the snow from my front door to the animal building and went every day to check on everyone's animals, computers, freezers, etc.
That is terrible to hear about Jaga's setback due to the outage. She is a friend of mine as well; we always enjoy seeing each other at meetings.
It is worth noting that a five-to-six week experimental setback is not much in the grand scheme of a research program. What grad student or post-doc hasn't lost five-to-six weeks numerous times in their careers just due to experiments that fail, silly mistakes, wrong DNA in tube, genotype incorrect, etc?
This is precisely why redundant power is so critical.
Our office provides some critical items like open meeting notices, rules and regulations filings, Central Voter Registration System, etc.
When we were relocating I mentioned that redundant power was critical. We put in an APC Symmetra UPS and a Cummins natural gas fired generator. We NEVER lose power.
However our DNS services are provided by another agency and when their power goes out, nobody can get to any of our resources. All is not lost though, they're installing their own generator now - we were the inspiration for that one.
Here's a story about never saying never...
Once upon a previous lifetime, back in the day, I worked at/with/for an up-and-coming Internet biz. Our main data center had path-diverse redundant power feeds directly from substations of the regional power company. We had a generator that could power my hometown. We test-started the generator periodically. And yet my pager awakened me in the middle of a stormy night with the news that our data center had lost power.
The generator didn't start. Its software control system failed just when we needed it.
It was really, really fun to inform the customers who had been promised that our power could never fail.
The moral of that story? Addressing the easily-predicted failure modes might make it more likely that one will experience the more bizarre failure modes. Or, forget ye not the Law of Murphy.
Cheers
Immediately after Fran, they built a new animal facility on campus with triple power backup. Through hurricanes, ice storms and every other disaster imaginable, my experiments hummed on. One winter there was deep snow - something for which NC towns are not prepared for - and since I lived across the street from campus, I dug a canal in the snow from my front door to the animal building and went every day to check on everyone's animals, computers, freezers, etc.
That is terrible to hear about Jaga's setback due to the outage. She is a friend of mine as well; we always enjoy seeing each other at meetings.
It is worth noting that a five-to-six week experimental setback is not much in the grand scheme of a research program. What grad student or post-doc hasn't lost five-to-six weeks numerous times in their careers just due to experiments that fail, silly mistakes, wrong DNA in tube, genotype incorrect, etc?