
It's a beautiful Saturday evening in June -- time for a story. Today i was messing around with computers and I remembered something that happened years ago. I was working for the Math Dept at the University Of Wisconsin and I had to type in a command that, if I typed it in wrong, could really do a lot of damage. If I did it wrong, I would have to reinstall stuff, restore from backups, etc. It might take days. So I checked and double checked what I had typed. Then I stopped and checked it again, just in case. Finally, I hit the enter key and ... my machine went down. I could hear the hard drive and the fan spin to a stop. Worse, all the machines in the room were going down. And then I realized that even the lights had gone off! It was only a split second before it hit me -- this was just a coincidence. The building had suffered a power outage and it had nothing to do with what I had typed. But for that split second, I came pretty close to filling my pants.