Still on dialup

Which is painfully slow after you’ve grown used to cable modem. TV’s also still down — went to Radio Shack and bought an antenna, but it didn’t help, I don’t know if that’s because the stations themselves are on limited power or if I just don’t have any reception here. Anyway, point is, access to media is still a bit limited, so I don’t know if this is an apocryphal story or not, but supposedly guests of one of the big midtown hotels had to sleep out on the street because their electronic card keys wouldn’t work during the power outage and the hotel had no alternate means of getting into their rooms.

Made me think of the original Star Trek episodes, where some evil alien would take over the Enterprise and turn off the turbolift, trapping the crew on the bridge. Watching it, you always thought, that’s not terribly good writing — if there were a real starship, of course they’d have some way of opening the door manually in an emergency.

Well, if the story’s true, it looks like hotel planners are taking cues from Gene Roddenberry.