Not strictly a birding topic but relates to online usage. The severe
thunderstorms in Chesterfield yesterday afternoon resulted in lightning
strikes to our house and a tree within 30 feet. The lightning hit the phone
line and blew the phone jack connector across the room, but not before it
fried two desktop computers and a printer. The only reason I am able to send
this story is that our portable was not connected. Moral of the story is that
it is not enough to turn off and unplug a computer during a thunderstorm, you
should also disconnect it from the phone line. Also remove any backup
floppies or zip disks from their drives. My backup zip disk with 30,000 plus
birding records and all our banking records was in the zip drive at the time.
We were eventually able to eject the zip disk by connecting the drive to the
second desktop that still at least has power although it won't boot up, but
we still don't know if the data is OK.
Wendy Ealding
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