I was at Siebel Center today, hacking at some Rails code, when the entire building lost power.

And there goes the power at Siebel. Someone really doesn’t want me to get work done. (Link)

Little did I know, this was actually happening all over campus. I went around to take a few pictures on my iPhone. Yes, these are not very great pictures, but you get the point. I was going to post a map to go with these pictures, but UIUC’s site is down. Silly lack of offsite backups…

Right outside of my apartment, you can see that Siebel center (left) has some emergency lighting, while NCSA (right), where I work, has completely lost power.

The parking structure north of Siebel was barely lit.

Driving around for a bit, I noticed that Grainger was also without power.

I drove around the engineering quad.

Tennis courts. No lighting at all.

On Wright Street, looking towards Grainger.

It looked like the businesses on Green were okay.

But the the rest of Green street going towards campus…

MechE buildling? I think.

Yeah, that’s the Union.

I really need a camcorder or a camera or something. Blah.

Realization

I got on Twinkle, an iPhone Twitter application that pulls tweets based on location, when I lost power while working at Siebel, and really couldn’t find all too many people chirping about what happened. I really don’t pay attention to local news either, other than knowing the weather forecasts, and so I was pretty much in the dark (wee! pun!) for a little while.

The realization was this: that this desire to stay on top of the blogosphere is moving into local news. I want to know if the bands I love are coming to play. I want to know if a power outage takes out (maybe) the entire campus. I want to know if a nuclear launch was detected near the Engineering Quad.

Of course, Twitter can definitely power this, but as with almost all social networking tools, its power to inform is directly proportional to the number of people using it… and frankly, there aren’t too many of us.