The lights are off, but someone's home

As anyone in San Diego knows, last Thursday there was a major power outage that covered the entire county of San Diego. When the power went out, I didn't think much of it as it was hot and I thought it was just a rolling blackout. I was on my way out the door to pick up flowers for my wife for our 10th wedding anniversary. While not very romantic, I was off to Costco to get the flowers; after all these years, my wife knows where I get flowers and likes them nonetheless. It took me about 45 minutes round trip to make it to Costco; the store, like just about every store was closed. On the way home, I decided to take a shortcut through a parking lot as I didn't want to deal with another traffic light that was out. On my way through it, I saw people going into Albertsons, so I stopped and went in to see if I could get flowers.

Right inside, I saw people loading up on ice, so I grabbed 2 bags, then decided to grab 2 more. The store ran their registers on a generator, so they were raking in the dough. I paid by credit card and was on my way; I wanted to preserve cash just in case.

When I got home, I started thinking if we were prepared. I dumped the ice in the fridge and managed to save most of the contents. My wife and son arrived home awhile later; it took them almost 2 hours to come home from SeaWorld; normally a 25 minute trip.

It was still quite warm outside and we made the decision that we were going to camp outside since the temperature in our house was too high to be tolerable. With flashlights and candles, we were pretty much set for the night. My wife slapped together a dinner using our supply of canned tuna and some salad fixings.

While the power was only off for about 10 hours (it came back on about 1:45 am), it really got me thinking about a real disaster. The news touted that San Diego was pretty well prepared; however, I think the gridlock shows that we still have a lot to do in order to be prepared. Personally, we weren't too bad off; we have a gas grill ready for cooking, we have food, a can opener, batteries, flashlights, etc. The only things that I think we need to do better is get on a schedule of restocking supplies such as batteries, water, first aid supplies, and food. We have a pool and chlorine, so water wasn't going to be an issue. I have bottles of water, but due to them being in plastic, I need to make sure we replenish them.

The one major thing I didn't have was a portable radio. I used my car's radio to listen as well as followed @KPBSNews. Cell coverage was spotty as cell sites were pretty much clogged.

So, what have I learned? I've ordered a solar powered, hand cranked radio (the reviews on them are so mixed, I just have to take a chance). I'm going to pick up additional bottles of water and have setup a calendar where I've started to put a schedule of when things need to be replaced.

Can San Diego survive a major earthquake? I'm not sure. It was kind of scary as I had no idea how long the power would be out; we're so reliant on power and technology that without it, people kind of go crazy. Maybe this will serve as a wake up call for everyone, including me.

Digging out from the deluge of email

I've been dealing with email for about 20 years now and the amount of email that I (and everyone) receive has increased over that time. In addition, the email has become more and more important. It's no longer forwarding of jokes, continuing chain letters, or just quick "hello" messages, it is absolutely vital to businesses these days.

Unfortunately people are having a hard time dealing with the deluge of email they receive. For many, every email is extremely important and when you receive 100+ email messages a day, your entire day is spent dealing with email. So some people simply just don't read or respond to email. This, of course, creates a problem for others that rely on replies. In extreme cases, I've heard of people that go on vacation and when they return, send out a message saying that they deleted all their email (on purpose) and to resend anything that is important.

I'm probably in the minority in that I handle a large amount of email everyday with very little effort. My strategy for dealing with email is quite simple. I go with the inbox zero principle in that every message that I haven't dealt with stays in the Inbox and I try to clear it everyday. Next, I skim subjects and to/cc recipients. If the message is unimportant, like out of the office or "free tomatoes", it immediately goes in the trash. If I'm in the to/cc line, I spend a few extra minutes on the message and see if I need to act on it. If I do, I try to act on it quickly so that I don't forget about it. If I'm not in the to/cc line, I see if the subject is something I need and then skim the first part of the message (I'm also a fan of "top quoting" where the most recent part of a message is at the top of the message). I'll act on it, if necessary and then move on.

I also deal with email throughout the day so that it doesn't pile up. It also doesn't hurt that I have very good time management skills and can handle a large amount of data at a time.

Maybe I should hone my skills a bit and start teaching classes "how to deal with email quickly and effectively".

Misclassified Restaurants in Search Engines

We don't go out to dinner all that often and when we do, we visit the same places. When we want to look for some place new, we do online searches or use sites like Yelp! Unfortunately, it seems that the results I get are not all that helpful. My wife asked me what kind of food I'd like for our anniversary dinner next week and I said Cuban food. I did a search on Google and came up with:

While I'd like to think that this is a fluke, I tried the search again today and got the same result. I'm not sure why I have so many problems looking for restaurants. Maybe all the tools out there are lacking complete, up to date, and honest information. Maybe that's a new business, but I'm not sure how to promote it to consumers that the data is better than everything else.

Proofreading Mass Email

Last week I changed my AT&T account to be a 900 minute plan. As part of the change, AT&T sent email confirming it. The automatic email, however, was not proofread. The bullet points should have been alphabetical (in English), numerical, or simply bullets. AT&T sent the email with the bullets being Hebrew letters.

Also, the link in the email goes to a server that doesn't exist.