Hey, we’re back! It’s been an interesting twenty-four hours. It appears lightning struck some three inches from our house, found the cable line, and thought, Hey, I bet there are sweet sweet electronics in there for me to munch on<\/i>. And, lo, it was so.<\/p>\n
As things go, this could have been so much worse. All four of us were in the kitchen eating when Zeus decided he’d had enough of our lip. As reported earlier, Misty could smell the ozone, and had she or I been standing at the sink, it’s possible we could have been struck. Our house could have caught fire, which, when coupled with the stifling heat and driving hot rain, would have been just swell. I was out in it for a minute to make sure no flames were leaping merrily on our roof, and let me tell you, I’m glad I didn’t have to wait out there while fire engine sirens dopplered towards us. We also didn’t have air conditioning for thirty minutes, until I got smart and went outside again and flipped the breaker next to the a\/c unit.<\/p>\n
We’ve had a fun time figuring out what all went wrong. My old CRT monitor in the office had a nice corona effect on it that went away after degaussing, but was otherwise fine. Misty’s and my computers lived through it. The Linux box was less fortunate, though all it lost were the on-board PS2 and ethernet interfaces. The cable modem was toast, as was the wan side of our wireless router. Our TV’s gone, or at least the part of it that turns electrical signals into video, so if anyone wants a very large and power-hungry Philco, have I got a deal for you. Two different repairmen told me not to bother doing anything with it other than perhaps turning it into an art installation piece. The seven-year-old TiVo likewise is dead, and the magic smoke came out of our D-Link streaming media thingy.<\/p>\n
While we have a large pile of useless electronics in our living room right now, we’re all fine, and all we lost were conveniences. Geof<\/a>, Jon and Ashley<\/a>, and Jeff<\/a> have all come through in our hour of want, loaning equipment and helping me convince the Linux box to ignore the smoky-smelling ethernet port in favor of the old ethernet card I shoved down its throat. I’m not happy about what happened, mind you, but we’ve come out of it okay, and we’ve been again reminded that we have the bestest friends around.<\/p>\n Now who wants to explain this new-fangled HDTV thing to me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey, we’re back! It’s been an interesting twenty-four hours. It appears lightning struck some three inches from our house, found the cable line, and thought, Hey, I bet there are sweet sweet electronics in there for me to munch on. And, lo, it was so. As things go, this could have been so much worse. … Continue reading We Are Back Online<\/span>