This is going to be a very short recap of the week at Mobile Tech Manor (MTM) with my traveling to San Francisco for most of the week for the Mobilize 08 conference. The part of the week I was in MTM was dominated by Hurricane Ike and the lack of power. It will be short and sweet so come on in for a visit to my world.
The week started off with a bang with Hurricane Ike coming right down our throats. One of our jkOnTheRun readers was thoughtfully pulling wind forecasts for the storm based on my location and at one point the forecast was showing the eye of Ike to be forecast to pass directly over our heads. The storm moved a little east so fortunately for us here it didn’t pass directly overhead but Ike was so large that it was definitely one of the biggest storms to hit the Gulf Coast for decades.
The power at Mobile Tech Manor went out on Friday night and didn’t come back on until the next Thursday evening. Going days without power turned working at MTM into an exercise trying to keep laptop and phone batteries charged enough to get some work done. I was tweaking the power settings on all the computers at MTM so I could eke out the last drop of power to both keep working and to keep informed about the aftermath of the storm. It is amazing how dependent we have gotten on video news coverage. We had the news playing on a battery-powered radio but it was the brief online video news that had us hovering over the notebook as a group. Words just couldn’t accurately describe the destruction that Ike left behind like the panning camera could.
I have several notebooks and phones at MTM and I made sure all the batteries were fully charged prior to Ike’s arrival and I was able to work from Friday night until Monday morning without power to recharge. I was out of juice so Monday morning I headed out to find someplace that was open so I could charge some batteries. It was a long and strange drive with no traffic lights working and most businesses still closed but I finally found a Starbucks that was open. It was the fourth Starbucks I visited and I was just about to give up when I found the one open. The place was absolutely packed with others like me trying to get online and charge up their batteries.
I pulled out my travel power strip and hooked up my two laptops to charge and get two other folks charging too. I was there for a few hours to at least get enough juice in the batteries to keep me working before leaving for San Francisco the next day. It was great of the Starbucks folks to provide a place for us to come in and hook up for a while. It was also good to see T-Mobile open up the hotspot for everyone to access for free. For most folks this visit to Starbucks was the first they had been able to get online to get the news about the city post-Ike and to say everyone was anxious would be an understatement. I never lost the ability to connect to the Verizon BroadbandAccess (EV-DO) network which I was thankful for so I was not quite so desperate for news like the others.
Ike was devastating for the Texas Gulf Coast and I was going to cancel my trip to San Francisco but my wife insisted I go. I was glad I went as it was a great trip and the power was restored the evening before my trip back. Now it’s time to deal with the repairs that need to be done from Ike. The only good thing I can say that came out of Ike was the coming together of the entire community to help those in need. It was great to see everyone pitching in to help each other in this time of need. The human spirit is wonderful to behold.
That’s all to report from the past week. As you can understand it was not a lot of fun. I am thankful for the trip to San Francisco and the great folks I got to meet there. Thanks for stopping by and I’ll see you next week.
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