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According to Thursday’s Honolulu Advertiser, HPD and Oceanic Time Warner personnel believe copper thieves were responsible for an outage during the Sugar Bowl on Tuesday.

An Oceanic line near the Wilson Tunnel was snagged by a downed tree Tuesday afternoon. Soon afterwards, someone found the cable and bent it open at a 90-degree angle, as if they were looking for copper wiring.

It was a fiber optic line. It’s full of glass strands, without a trace of copper.

When the outage occurred around 5:15 pm HT, my Georgia Bulldogs were leading the Hawaii Warriors 7-3. That was the closest margin that UH could muster. Georgia scored an easy 41-10 victory that made me wonder why the Bulldogs weren’t paired with USC instead. The Trojans would have had a much harder time against Georgia than the Illini.

About half of that line’s fibers remained unbroken as the would-be copper thieves skipped away to darken our island some other day. Backup systems kept 85,000 homes that were using that cable online during the outage, but 5,000 homes in Punaluu, Kaneohe, Kailua and Hawaii Kai were offline for up to an hour.

All 80,000 neighbor island customers were offline for even longer, according to the Advertiser. The outage really wrecked some Sugar Bowl parties. Terrestrial reception on the neighbor islands is spotty at best, so antennas were of little value. When cable service returned, there were reports of poor audio or video.

I was home in Honolulu, where I watched the entire game on my computer via a DSL connection to my cable television box in New Jersey. No worries here!

Hawai’i: It hasn’t been a great week for students at UH-Manoa. Parking is a nightmare as usual. The university’s implementation of its Banner registration software had some gaps, including a feature that would have allowed UH administrators to see how manys tudents were on the wait-list for each class. As a result of this and an unexpected surge in enrollment, several hundred UH students have been unable to enrolll for the classes they need. Thirty new classes were added on Monday, but some classes have many more students than the recommended maximum. It reminds me of my college days, when students were lurking outside offices and classrooms, hoping that another student had dropped the course. This will cause problems with the teachers union.

At least the football season opens 11 days, although the Warriors may have trouble beating Florida Atlantic.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• University of Hawaii
• 2 August 2004: Frear Hall sits dormant on UH-Manoa campus
• 16 July 2004: UH-Manoa has no short-term fix for dorm crunch
• 15 July 2004: Oahu students get low priority for UH-Manoa housing

Funny: John Dvorak presents a brief list of advertising, sports and movie cliche sites. My favorite movie cliche is the fruitcart, which Roger Ebert named. Loud music in the stadium is a great sports cliche, along with hockey teams skating to a tie.

Sports: Ex-UGA QB Qunicy Carter has been released by the Dallas Cowboys. Reports indicate he tested positive for an illegal substance. With ex-Buc and perrenial washout Vinny Testaverde as their starting QB, we can write off the Cowboys season right now. Unless they buy another QB first; the Cowboys are the Yankees of football, after all.

USA: The New York Times reports that former Texas Governor Ann Richards had some good remarks at the DNC: shotgun wedding! I love it!

“You know, for American women in a Republican majority, their president has been like a marriage that’s gone from bad to worse. You know the story. The guy has a great line, he’s sort of cute, he tells you that life together will be bliss, and then in a few years he’s snoring on the couch while the TV blares on the fifth football game of the day and the neighbors are screaming about the yard that never gets mowed, and there’s a car up on blocks in the driveway, and your household budget is just stretched to the limit, and he’s spending all the money on hunting trips, a new shotgun and a camo jumpsuit, and you’re standing there at the sink thinking, ‘I must have been out of my mind!’ So here we are, almost four years past our shotgun wedding with this White House, and like we say in Texas: Honey, it’s time to split the sheets and sign the legal papers.”