Let the Blue Smoke Out, Again!

Zap! Last week some free elec­trons rushed from the some­place out there to a pole and into my house via the POTS line (plain old tele­phone sys­tem). Killed my DSL modem and Gig switch in the process. Luck­ily I also have cable (and 3G) oth­er­wise I would be – and my wife more so – going through crazy Inter­net with­drawls. Crazy, I tell you.

Pow! Lovely but sick­en­ing blue spark emi­nates from an unter­mi­nated CAT-​5 drop under the enter­tain­ment center…the idiot box and time-​sucking time-​shift machine along with tuner cards are fine. Foot­note: all of our com­put­ers are named after Mary Tyler Moore show or spin-​offs, I don’t know why. Except for the HDPVR, and it’s name is Mr. Jones. I don’t know why.

Fiz­zle! Mr. Jones is fine. Ted (You know, News Caster Ted…tell me you catch reruns on the Nick @ Night cable chan­nel), my pri­mary radio/​surfing machine in the other room but oth­er­wise on the same net­work (we have two…I don’t know why) was fine except for any device that con­nects via a USB-​to-​Serial cable. Long story short, replaced the USB2Serial Cable and the tuner will not lis­ten any­more on the Ser­ial port. Just got the thing back from LDG repair a month ago. Feh.

Poof! I am non-​plussed by the inter­face of the AT-​200PC anyways…I had some thought about using it for PC-​Ale a while ago but it turned out to be a notion for now. I am look­ing at the Array Solu­tions SGC clones any­ways, so I may just go that direc­tion. And now the point of this blog…

Spark! Light­ning is dan­ger­ous, and I have lots invested in elec­tron­ics. I am invest­ing in the I.C.E light­ning pro­tec­tion devices for all sig­nal entry points in my house. A small invest­ment over­all for great protection.