Saturday was day 3 of the Buckeye Game Fest in Columbus. They invited several of the panelists who used to attend Marcon (also in Columbus) to come and talk. As incentive, we got a free membership and an hour to sell books from a table in the high-traffic area.

So, a few hours chatting with friends on panels for a free table to sell books.

Sounded good.

I had a good time, put myself on the "alert me when the kickstarter starts" for a new game, and got home well after midnight.

About 4 hours later, with absolutely not enough sleep, I woke to the beep-beep of a UPS, soon joined by the geek chorus, and two cats howling in counterpoint.

They seem to like the sound even less than I do.

This isn't an issue. In 10 seconds the generator kicks on and all the critical circuits have power.

Thirty seconds later, I gave up trying to sleep and decided to investigate the issue.

One of the clever things I did when we moved in was to hang a squeeze-lights on the windows in rooms where someone may be when the power goes out. My reasoning is that even when there's no power, there's enough light to find a window and see something opaque hanging there.

I now have an existence proof that this works.

With the aid of the squeeze-light, I found my headset lamps, and went outside to talk with the generator.

I pushed the switch to "Manual", and the generator nicely turned over, but didn't start. A couple of these attempts and the starter motor just clicked.

I got a voltmeter and the battery voltage was about 11, not the usual 13 or so.

I've had an issue before where the battery didn't get recharged properly. It's easy to fix, just hook the battery to my battery charger... Right, no power.

Having concluded that there was nothing I could do, I reported the outage to DTE and went back to bed.

By 9:00 AM, I was feeling less exhausted, if not rested. DTE informed me that I'd have power by midnight.

In fact, DTE beat their estimate by about 12 hours. I recharged the battery, and on the next test cycle, the generator ran just fine.

Nice that the tests work, at least.

I was interviewed by Dawn Chick of Free Form Art Productions for her FFAP podcast last month. This is now live at:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/153363438?pr=true

The podcast starts by talking with a pro wrestler.

I've never tag teamed pro wrestling before!

My piece starts at 22:45

I googled an ego-scan and discovered a friend had used a recording of one of my songs for the background music to a video of a No-Kings protest.

It's available here

It's always a thrill to see someone actually listening to my odl music. The recording she used was from ConChord II in 1985.