Quoting the internets:

Oprah Winfrey, age 54, was found dead in her home residing in Chicago, Illinois at 8:21 AM on September 20, 2008. Local Police and the FBI are trying to keep it on the down low for now until further notice. From what has been reported thus far, she appears to have a bloody area around her eye, a bullet wound in her stomach and some cuts and bruises up and down her body. They suspect she was beaten while she was trying to sleep, and shot in the side with a silenced handgun. According to the FBI, she was killed anywhere around 1:00-2:00 A.M. this morning.

The assassin was indeed very stealthy and un-noticeable, as the FBI has no idea who or what could of done this. They consider that she even might of painfully commited suicide due to the lack of evidence.

“I didn’t hear a thing, I was up until 4 last night just watching T.V. and reading some books, nothing suspicious was heard or seen, I even went outside for some ‘cigs’ a couple of times and saw nothing” -Markus Julane, Oprah’s down the street neighbor.

This blog will be updated with further info on Oprah Winfrey’s death as soon as the FBI gets things straightened out.

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Score one for power management

I came home from the gym just now to find the microwave clock blinking *18:88 which is of course never a good thing. I guess unless it's 7:28 pm? Anyway, I poked my head into my office where both my new desktop and work laptop were running. But all was quiet. Granted, these are pretty quiet machines, but it was just too quiet. Sure enough, both were off -- which means the power must have been out most of the time I was gone. The UPS probably can only power things for a half hour, but the laptop battery should have kept it going quite some time (though it's docked, so I'm not sure if it uses more power then). The laptop is plugged into the UPS, but in a "surge-protection-only" slot. Plus, both machines were largely idle.

I cranked up the laptop first, and the "resuming windows" screen popped right up. So the XP power settings worked properly -- when the battery gets low, hibernate. It did and restored just fine. Perfect.

Next I started my new desktop which is running Vista 64, which I'm not very familiar with. I just played around to enable Hibernate mode last night but only used it once. I'm not sure how the UPS software would respond or what would happen. But as it booted, I got a plain text screen saying that the battery ran low, so the system went into hibernation. Do I want to restore? Sounds good to me, let's restore. It also picked right back up where it was. Awesome -- behaved exactly as it should have.

This is such a far cry from years ago where I would shut down my desktop when I went to lunch. Back then (that was a 486-100 machine) when power would hiccup, odds were fair that as the computer blinked off it was in the middle of writing to a disk. And thus corrupting it. I can't recall how many hard drives I had to replace due to corruption, usually caused by power issues. But now we have battery backups that last at least long enough to tell the machine to shut down. I think every (non-laptop) computer in the house should be on one. Which means I need to get a new one because there isn't one upstairs -- the one for the home theater PC is really old and powers the TV and cable box too, so I should get a new on there and put the older on up on my son's machine.

I'm quite impressed how this stuff "just works" nowadays.