Yesterday when the power failed during the nasty thunderstorms over Hunt Valley, our Nortel PBX system at the office switched over to battery power to maintain service. As it did, the battery burst.

This morning a HazMat team was called in to survey the situation before the technicians will be allowed to enter the room and repair the switch. In the mean time, all our external connections to the PBX are unavailable and we can't make or receive outside calls.

Luckily the T1 did not suffer a similar fate and the Internet is happily buzzing along, so I.T. (which is not in charge of phone service in this office) did not have to implement any of our business continuity plan (aka headless chicken response) actions.

As an added bonus, I am pretty much unreachable to salespeople. Happy Monday!

Something also took out the north wing air conditioning, so my office this morning was hovering around 85 degrees and 78 percent RH. I was tempted to bring in my beach chair and umbrella from the car just to make a point.

The weather service is reporting a high tree pollen count this morning, but so far I haven't noticed any adverse reactions. I may even skip the Zyrtec today just to see what happens.

The drak.net name servers (ns.drak.net at least) have open axfr. Many amusing secrets lurk in zone files.

Suzy called me towards the end of the workday to say that when she went to adjust the screen on her iBook G4 that the whole thing just went black and stopped working.

Thinking the battery was dead, she plugged in the power supply and noticed a blinking subcutaneous orange light to the left of the power button, but the unit refused to power on.

When I got back I did a quick investigation and noticed how bad the smell from the unit was. We went to the Apple Store and about an hour later got the ear of an Apple guru to hear our case.

It took him less than a minute to smell the odor coming from the box and declare it a mail-off warranty issue with a trouble ticket reading "Unit will not power on, burning smell."

We asked him what the blinking orange light to the left of the power button meant. He told us there was no LED there on any of the iBooks.

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