Lightning
Around 4:15, I noticed the lights in my office dim, flicker, and fade. My G5 winked off, as did the LED inside my PowerBook’s charger cable. About a second later, a rumble confirmed that lightning had struck somewhere near Rice and taken out our power. The emergency generator continued to operate some essential lights (and, oddly, the 802.11 base stations, which I guess must be attached to the same circuit).
Power was restored about a half-hour later, but the network didn’t come up immediately, so I left. It appears to still be down:
$ traceroute rice.edu
traceroute to rice.edu (128.42.5.4), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 10.49.128.1 (10.49.128.1) 670.315 ms 17.596 ms 21.082 ms
2 pos5-3.hstntxroy-rtr1.houston.rr.com (24.28.96.69) 16.623 ms 20.051 ms 17.799 ms
3 srp13-0.hstntxtid-rtr1.houston.rr.com (24.28.100.17) 15.267 ms 15.873 ms 11.956 ms
4 pos9-0.hstntxtid-rtr4.texas.rr.com (24.93.34.94) 17.817 ms 14.901 ms 48.264 ms
5 * * *