A passing thought this morning, as I walked from here to there: I am not sure if I’ve ever been on the Samford campus when the power went out. All of the lines here are buried and the service has always been excellent. The things we take for granted, no?

So late this afternoon the power blinked. And it blinked again and then once more. After a few minutes, wherein students in the newsroom were confessing their fears of the dark and people and clowns and four-leaf clovers and who knows what else, the power blinked one more time.

We noticed the hardwired connection first.

The wireless was down as well. There’s a router right outside the window. Turns out that continual green ring of light means something. You never notice it until it is a pale red, which means you don’t have an Internet connection, so you have the opportunity to notice the telltales on routers:

Telnet was beginning the march.

All of our phones and Internet are tied together in a VOIP, so they didn’t work. Some of the locks on campus are tied into that network, so those doors didn’t work.

I raided my emergency peanut butter stash.

Also, the printer died, because today was a Tuesday:

I’ve renamed that machine the Lazarus. It keeps coming back, though we’ve been worried about it for almost four years now.

Somehow, the cash registers in the cafeteria and food court were online. So the crisis was merely humanitarian rather than truly dire. And the IT people here know their stuff. In perhaps an hour or two — who can tell the passage of time without the web? — things began returning to normal.

But all of that let me hear this:

Student 1: “What did we do before the Internet?”

Student 2: “We were prepared for it.”

For a group of people who grew up with the Internet always at their beck and call, this is an interesting point. There’s a story in this. I wonder if anyone will write it.

Things to read … because people went to the trouble to write it.

Mike Lutzenkirchen is an incredibly brave man, Philip Lutzenkirchen’s father uses son’s life — and death — to motivate high school players:

Mike Lutzenkirchen, standing before the James Clemens High School football team in its weight room Tuesday afternoon, called out Logan Stenberg, the Jets’ offensive tackle, and had him leave the room so that Lutzenkirchen could illustrate a point.

After Stenberg obliged, Lutzenkirchen said, “He just stood right there in the flesh. Now he’s not here. A teammate. That’s how quickly it can happen. That’s how quickly you can lose somebody.”

His son, the former Auburn star Philip Lutzenkirchen, one of the Tigers’ most popular players in recent seasons, was killed in a car wreck in Troup County, near LaGrange, Ga. He was 23 years old.

Mike Lutzenkirchen, who also spoke to the Huntsville High football team Tuesday evening, shared an array of statistics about his son’s sensational career. There was one stat he saved until the last, the one that is most staggering and devastating.

“Listen to this closely: Point three seven seven,” Lutzenkirchen said. “That was Philip’s blood alcohol content.”

Hard to imagine what he must be going through.

And now, for something a bit lighter:

Journalism and tech links:

VR journalism! Harvest of Change: Iowa farm families confront a nation in transition

A Wearable Drone That Launches Off Your Wrist To Take Your Selfie

The (surprisingly profitable) rise of podcast networks

Staying connected with college graduates: Social media and alumni

Magazines Get a Way to Measure Their Reach Across Media Platforms

Things you don’t want to hear from your doctor, American Family Care alerts customers of stolen laptops containing patient information.

I’m having my students read this story this week, Dispatcher reflects a week after Birmingham UPS shooting: ‘I asked God to lead my words’:

“The officers, they did a great job,” said Davis, otherwise known as Operator 8061. “They did a good job in responding and getting me notified so that I could make my notifications.”

Davis, an 18-year BPD dispatch veteran, said she was just one of many dispatchers who sprang into action when the first call from the UPS customer center on Inglenook Lane came into the radio room at 9:21 a.m.

“Had it not been for my coworkers helping me, it would not have gone as smooth as it did,” she said. “It wasn’t just me. It was a team effort. I was proud to be a Birmingham Police Department dispatcher that day.”

The challenge of that day isn’t unusual. Dispatchers and officers deal with a crisis of some sort almost each and every day, though not usually to that extent.

About 10 calls came in to the radio room almost simultaneously after the shots erupted in the UPS warehouse. Those nearly dozen calls accounted for one dispatch, one of 11,663 dispatches handled by BPD last week alone.

And then there’s this stupid story, New York artist creates ‘art’ that is invisible and collectors are paying millions.

If the empty art studio burns down, how much does the insurance company pay out?

You can only figure that out with an Internet connection.