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Yesterday morning a courteous but short-spoken PGE contractor knocked on the door to let me know he was going to be installing a new wireless electrical meter, as our last bill had told us to expect. I asked him to give me a minute to turn off my computer and went about my business. He finished the job in 5 minutes and was gone. The power wasn't even out long enough for all the clocks to lose their time.

However, when I went to restart my computer, it froze up in the middle of booting. A sense of foreboding turned serious as I realized that something had occurred during his work that "let some of the magic smoke" out of my computer. It didn't appear totaled, but the hard drives no longer seemed to exist, so not only was my computer dead, but I had no idea of the state of 3 years worth of data, including about 6 months that I had no backup for such as job hunting materials and photos.

Fortunately, my years fixing the sorts of havoc that only naive college students can wreak upon a computer left me with a few tricks up my sleeves, and my previously unjustified reluctance to throw out the partially scavenged shell of my old computer payed off. With some transplanting, re-wiring, and a clean OS install on an obsolete drive I had it booting again. Thanks to my external hard drive enclosure, I found out my hard drives were still good. Apparently the transient had somehow made it past the surge protector, through the power supply, and only taken out the SATA controller on the far corner of the motherboard. It looks like I need a new motherboard, but as far as electrical damage to a computer goes, this turned out to be mild.

Last weekend's soccer game was more or less a blowout. We finished 5-1 after they snuck in a funny arcing shot right at the end that caught the keeper off balance. He'd made up for it earlier though by blocking a penalty kick for a foul I'd been called for in the box. For the record, I most definitely did not commit a foul.