I live in California. There was an announcement on the Drudge Report tonight that the electric companies in the western states, including California, will operate at reduced power.......about 80% of norm, from 9:00 pm on Dec. 31st until about 2:00 am on January 1st. My question.......is it safe to have my computer on during the period of reduced power? I was planning on monitoring the various live web cam sites here on the net during rollover.

-- Linda (lindasue1@earthlink.net), December 30, 1999

Answers

Linda,

Yes it is safe. They are going to generate less power because less power is expected to be needed.

Major users always let the power companies know when they will be powered up or down. Being a holaday, New Years is known as a lower power consuption time.

Due to caution because of Y2k some industries who normally would be powered up are now going to be powered down and have let the utilities know so they can act acordenly by producing less power.

How about posting some of the web-cam sites you will be viewing? That is a great idea and I would like to watch them too.

-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), December 30, 1999.

Hi Cherri, Thanks for the response.........I was worried about dirty power. One of the web cam sites that promises to be really great is called Webcast of the Century. The Earthcam site has set up web cams in each of the time zones around the world. There's a world map with all the time zones on it, and you just point and click on the time zone you want to view. For the eastern U.S. the web cam is on Times Square. The URL is: http://www.earthcam.com/newyears/index_flash.html Again.......thanks for the help!

-- Linda (lindasue1@earthlink.net), December 30, 1999.

I LOVE! threads like this!

Someone asks a question and gets an answer, all in a civil atmosphere!

Wow! can you imagine what the y2k discussion might have been like if everyone acted like Linda & Cherri?

Happy rollover everyone!

-- middlegrounder (standing@in.the.middle), December 30, 1999.