Get ahead of power outages before they start

The worst time of the year, for weather-related home or business power outages, is from now to about late January. In our part of the country, the major threats are wind damage and large thunderstorms, which at least once a year do some serious damage and disrupt lives.

If you have appliances and other devices you need to run at home – and you don’t have a generator – the next best solution is having a power inverter/ converter. That unit hooks up to your vehicle battery and allows at least three or four solid hours of direct power to your main home or garage electrical devices.

Once the power goes down, it will be too late to start searching the Web for “solving power failures.” One way to plan ahead is visit a site like the Tripp-Lite storm adviser: www.tripplite.com/ severeweather.

Tripp-Lite, a successful firm based in Chicago, added that microsite this month. It’s meant to be a planning guide covering a host of serious calamities that would leave you without power. It’s worth looking over and considering your strategy for dealing with power outages.

Politalk.com

Did you know we have 23 candidates or probable candidates for president (and we’re only counting the Rs and the Ds)? One place online where you can track the fun and games is Politalk.com, a news and discussion site owned by NBC.

We found Politalk fairly easy to use. It plans to be forum-based, allowing groups and partisans lots of room for discussion and flaming.

NBC will be feeding video and news from all of its various national operations and from its owned and operated affiliates.