Geek in the dark
Even if you’re not in Hawaii, you probably heard by now about the massive power outage that occurred this past Friday by virtue of how it included the vacationing President-elect.
On this particular evening eGeekette and I were checking out the after Christmas sales down in Waikiki when we thought we saw the flickers of lightning in the sky. Since we didn’t hear thunder we figured the storm (if any) was far away and kept on window shopping. Little did we know…
Waikiki is one of those places I imagine is always brightly lit – kinda like Las Vegas – so you can imagine my surprise when everything all of a sudden went dark. No streetlights, all the stores blacked out. After a brief ohshit moment I had to take a couple pictures. You can’t really see what’s going on but that’s pretty much the point.
Lights in the darkness
There were people all around us but the only lights were from the passing cars and tiki torches down the street. I won’t be complaining about Hawaiian hula kitsch any time soon!
The next thing I tried to do was post the photo to Twitter and discovered that AT&T was offline (uh oh!). Good thing text services were still running as I began to get SMS updates from a conscientious buddy. Island-wide outage baby!
We made our way back to the car by the light of the iPhone (still useful even without service!) and began the perilous trek out of Waikiki. Not sure if everyone forgot or just didn’t know about the four-way stop rule when signals are out, but crossing every intersection felt like a game of chicken. Making matters worse were the ninja pedestrians jumping out of nowhere and darting across the street at random intervals.
Once we made it home AT&T was back up and I was able to track the unfolding news of the outage via Twitter in real time. Updates from the Twitterverse were often more current and relevant than what was on the radio. Things got even better when @Hawaii set up the #hipower hashtag that allowed everyone to follow all outage related tweets on Twitter Search.
Another lifesaver was my recently acquired Lenmar PowerPort universal battery. With the included adapters, we had juice for both my iPhone and eGeekette’s Palm Centro throughout the entire outage. Originally purchased as backup power for videos and music during air travel, it came in handy sooner than expected. Lenmar PowerPort FTW!
So where were you when the power went out?
