Cheer up, Les; Jesse Helms took his sorry ass and shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday. 

We did do something interesting; we were driving on the highway between Champaign and Normal during the fireworks hour, and at some places we could see up to 7 displays at once.  It was pretty cool.

The office should consider having a whole-building surge-suppressor installed (power company can do it), and make sure the bios is set to “stay off” in event of a power failure.  Because when the power comes back on, it often stutters a lot. Good luck on Monday.

The office doesn’t have any UPS systems

...

recovery from a power outage usually means a number of fried motherboards.

As my grandma used to say, “there’s none so daft as them that won’t learn”.

You are so lucky, I would love to miss a day off work because of power outage. Happy July 4th.

This might or might not be relevant to you. I was diagnosed with migrane headaches only to discover that sulfites were the culprit. They turn up in lots more places than red wine. Excellent reference here: http://www.readingtarget.com/nosulfites/index.htm

I modified my diet and never get a headache anymore unless I eat something I shouldn’t.

We have far too many power outages at work, at least it is just an office tower without any enterprise servers in it. I have UPS’s at home, but not at work.  When the power or network goes down at work, I just go (or stay) home and VPN into the datacenter.

I went camping at San Clemente State Beach for 4 days with in-laws and out-laws. The kids LOVED the camping - I survived. The campground was full and I looked around and thought, “What are all these people doing - leaving their $800,000 homes to come out in the wilderness and rough it - talk about crazy!”