Ahhhh The power of Nature

Ahhhh … the power of nature.

A thunderstorm in Iowa can spring up unexpectedly, going from bright sunshine
and unbearable humidity to torrents in a matter of minutes. I’m not a
meteorologist, so even though I’ve lived in Iowa most of my life, I’m still
clueless as to how these storms can come to life so quickly. But they do. And I
know all to well the potential consequences.

Iowa thunderstorms are one of the primary reasons I bought a UPS rather than
just another power strip when my cat, well, took out the last. The machine at
home has been my development machine for several months, now - long enough
anyway to be concerned about data loss in the event of an outage. I do regular
backups to CD, but that still doesn’t quite provide the level of comfort that I
was looking for. Throughout this Iowa thunderstorm season, the UPS has only
tripped off once. And, as you know, it alerted me on the cell phone when it went

to battery power.

The office is another matter. For whatever reasons, we just haven’t yet invested

in industrial strength power protection and conditioning. We have surge
protectors, but no UPS. Even those, apparently, are impotent under certain
conditions.

This afternoon, as I finished the GnomeCORE section of today’s Penguin Shell, an

all too familiar sound hit the office from the front window. I stood, looking
over the top of my divider wall, to see a downpour of a magnitude I’ve not seen
for awhile. The drops crashing into the front window sounded like hundreds of
tiny pebbles. In fact, it had such an explosive report, I wondered if it was
hail.

As I stood at a safe distance from the glass, I heard another sound - one that
was familiar but louder than I’ve ever heard. SNAP! It was followed, before I
could even turn to the noise, by the sound of my computer chirping in two tone
clusters. I restarted the machine with a feeling of panic rising at the back of
my throat.

The computer seemed to be working fine as it came back up. All but the Internet
access. I looked at the modem, noticing with familiarity that the “data” light
was off, and the “activity” light was flashing regularly. I’d seen this just a
few weeks ago. I walked around the divider to my business partner Adrian’s area
and saw that the lights on the DLink router were solid red. Not good. I
unplugged it to reset it and noticed that ozone smell I really dread when
working with electronics. The router was smoked dead, but for the lights on the
front panel.

No problem. I unplugged my machine connection from the router and pulled it
around the back end of the divider. The rain had already stopped, and I saw the
yellow cast of sunshine beginning to work through the clouds. I pulled the cable

from the modem into my area, unplugged the existing cable running from the
router, and clicked the direct connection from the modem into my ethernet card,
hoping that the card wasn’t fried, as well. The connection came up immediately.
“OK. Alla’s cool in Fullbrain land. Maybe we’ll have to move to wireless sooner
than we thought.”

I took a step back, watching the activity on the modem and considering whether
my day in the office was done. I do have to get ready for Gnomedex, after all. As
NPR’s “All Things Considered” began a parody commercial for the fictitious
American Association of Placebo Manufacturers, the sound hit me again - this
time in three rapid bursts. SNAP! AP! … SNAP! I jumped like those little beans

you buy in Tijuana for a buck. The lights on the modem had all gone solid. And
there was that smell. I held my shaking hands together to calm them. Then I
tried resetting the modem.

It looks like a call to Mediacom will be the first order of business in the
morning. I didn’t bother today. I unplugged the modem, shut down the computer,
and high-tailed it home, away from the amazing crackling electronics.

I didn’t hear a direct lighting hit, or even one that was close to the office.
The surge protectors seemed completely unaffected. I have to guess that the
cable line built up enough of a static charge during the storm to eventually
just fry both the router and the modem. That was the sound I heard - the sound a

finger touched to metal makes when you’ve dragged your feet through the carpet
in a room with very low humidity. If that’s the case, it was the biggest static
charge I’ve ever been close to.

Nature’s amazing. It is, though, one of electronics’ most deadly predators.

Tomorrow, I’m headed to Des Moines and the grand SiliCorn valley geek hoedown we

so lovingly call Gnomedex. Well, actually, I’ll be there on Thursday night
for the pre-Gnomedex get together. If you’re headed to Des Moines for the
weekend, stop and say hello. You know my face so much better than I know yours.
I’m looking forward to putting faces with emails, whether those messages were
good, bad or indifferent. I’ll look forward to seeing you there.

For the rest of you, a full report will follow in Monday’s issue. I’ll have the
Zaurus with me throughout. However, posting deadlines mean that I’ll actually
post Friday’s issue Thursday night, before we really get rolling. I still plan
on writing the Gnome Report section from the Zaurus - you just won’t be able to
catch it until Monday.

In the meantime, have a great Thursday.

See you in Des
Moines