It think I live in an area of Boise that performs rolling blackouts. I woke up this morning and had no power.

I was held hostage as I couldn't work. I would say a loss of power in a residential area is acceptable maybe once a year, but in my 4 years of living here I think I have been subject to no less than 15 power outages. This one was short, my best guesstimate from differences in clocks, etc. tell me that the down time was only about 25 minutes - previous outages have lasted several hours.

Combined with Cable Internet outages I have had a challenging time working from my home office over the years here. Luckily I have friends with offices nearby that will let me work from there if I need to. But it's hard to make the drive when by the time you get there power might be back up at home (plus, my garage door wouldn't open).

I have three UPS battery systems in my house. Sometimes the chirping from these guys (letting me know they are running on battery because the power is out) is enough to make me jump out of bed and run around like a mad man saving work and shutting down the right way.

I need to look into the power company some more, verify if my rolling blackouts theory is correct or not, and see if they have any RSS feed or e-mail mailing list to sign-up and receive notifications of planned outages.

Whoa! It just hit me that I have a contact in IT at my local power company! I can't wait until he shows up on Google Talk.

UPDATE FROM MY CONTACT:

as far as I know, they never have 'planned' outages

but I do know that most of the outages are due to squirrels, construction, auto-accidents, and other unplanned things

While I would like to blame squirrels, it was most likely due to construction since there is still a ton of it going on in my area, and that today's downtime was relatively short.