A Hurricane and Technology Dependence

Hurricane Isaias has passed by and dissipated, but I’ve barely gotten free of the major issues. Minor ones remain.

For us, power was out from Friday night, October 9, through Monday night, October 11, only to fail again the following Friday morning until Saturday. I had to get out the generator again and hook everything back up. My wife requires continuous oxygen, so it was essential to get the generator running quickly.

I planned effectively for our personal needs. I had nine oxygen cylinders, of which I used five during the storm and before it was practical to start the generator. After that, I had sufficient gas to keep the generator running as long as was needed. I got some additional gas as a precaution, but by that time gas was generally available, and it turned out I didn’t need it.

We also had two small battery systems that could provide power for limited lighting and could run my wife’s hospital bed controls even when the generator was not available.

All this turned out well.

My business was another matter. I knew it was going to be and simply braced myself to survive it. The catch is that several essential business functions require a live internet connection. Some of these can be accomplished using a phone or a phone’s hotspot plus a computer. I had reduced hotspot coverage to save monthly money as I hadn’t used it for a couple of years. I don’t actually rate that as a mistake. Some limitations would have remained even with better access, and the cost would have been significant.

There are certain things you can do without access, but my most important software, such as Adobe Creative Cloud apps, require internet action from time to time to verify licenses. I had an even more difficult situation here in that my Creative Cloud app wanted to update, and this was too much for my slow cellular hotspot. That was only a minor additional problem, as not being able to contact the license server was a serious issue in any case.

Of course, without power, my actual PC options were themselves limited to those I could get within extension cord range of the generator.

And then came the printers. I have a love-hate relationship with printers despite doing IT work for multiple decades. No, that’s not accurate. I just hate printers. Having used them since the 1980s, I have concluded that the technology is not yet mature.

And then there are ink subscriptions. I calculated out my expenses and general annoyance factor, which was already high (printers, you remember?), and got ink subscriptions for both my printers, one HP and one Brother. The test point was that I prepare bulletins each week for our church and print them.

The Brother printer printed 50 of our prayer lists, which are bulletin inserts, and then produced a message that I had to connect it to the internet. It would print no more. Fifty prayer lists is not enough. Fortunately, the HP kept running, apparently having a greater tolerance for printing without a connection, printed the prayer lists as well as the bulletins. It took a bit more time than it did with two machines running, but situation solved.

I have dark thoughts about canceling my Brother ink subscription and complaining bitterly, but hurricanes are not a daily experience, and the numbers I calculated when I chose a subscription rather than buying my own ink still stand.

But it’s worthwhile thinking about how much doesn’t work when you are disconnected.

Besides hardware that requires constant contact with a licensing service, we have SaaS, Software as a Service. It’s possible you might want to consider having something on hand that can run without a connection.

As a brief list, a key backup would be to have LibreOffice or OpenOffice installed on your PC which will run without a connection. Microsoft Office doesn’t instantly die, but will eventually ask for a connection. For book layout, which is what I do, you can try Scribus. I have it installed, but would only resort to it if I expected more than a week or so without a connection. If it’s lasting that long, you’re probably searching for survival supplies in any case. For graphics, there’s GIMP. You’d be more likely to want that, at least if you expect civilization to return in the form of a usable internet.

My point here is not to suggest that you can cover all contingencies. Rather, I want to point out how seriously we are connected (or at least I am) to the infrastructure of this economy, and how much can be shut down with only a relatively minor disaster.

It might be worthwhile to think of a few options for being less dependent. I, of course, remain one of the most wired people around. Your mileage may (or ought to) vary!