It was a dark and stormy night—really.
The next morning a line of severe thunderstorms rolled past northwest Florida and rambled on through parts of other southeastern states. We even had a tornado watch, including a robo call from county authorities urging us to hunker down and look for the safest room in the house to flee to should the worst happen. The Weather Channel even had a warning that the first thing to do when a tornado approached was not to grab a camera and run outside to take a picture of it!
My area, with heavy rains, escaped the worst of it. But the night before, in a preview of coming attractions, a brief storm popped up. I was working on a calibration for an upcoming review, and when the thunder started to rumble I elected to push on through it, since a hard deadline was fast approaching. Bad move. We lost power for just an instant, but it was long enough for the projector under review to shut down, along with my computer and a half-finished calibration. Luckily the projector powered up again without incident and none the worse for the abuse (it employs lasers for its illumination, not a lamp—lamps are very sensitive to being shut off without a fan-driven cool-down period. I had also saved enough data from the calibration to enable a quick re-do. I waited a bit until the storm passed, then resumed my work, though it was already, and perhaps appropriately, well past the witching hour.
But all that got me thinking seriously about power conditioners and surge protectors...
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