Yesterday I woke up grabbed my morning cup of coffee and went off to the computer to do a quick email and RSS check. I was happy to see that my new iMac was shipping and it was expected to arrive on Friday. I thought it was perfect timing, I do not have to work on Friday and could spend a good part of the day transferring the 150GB of data from my current Mac mini and clean that off and list it for sale before the weekend was out.

See, although I had the money for the new iMac I was hoping to cover at least some of the cost for the iMac by selling the mini. No luck, about 3:20 yesterday afternoon a very big and very close bolt of lightning hit close enough to my house to effectively kill that mini, a telephone, my EyeTV and somehow screw up my Apple Bluetooth headset as well. I am not sure how the headset was affected since it was just sitting on my desk near the computer and it was not even plugged in, but ever since the lightning strike all I get is static, strange because I used it yesterday around noon and it worked fine.

I have lived in Florida since the end of 1996 and have never had lightning affect anything inside my house until recently. About 3 weeks ago we had a lightning bolt fry my phone line, now this happened. Talk about bad luck.

Lucky for me I always back up, I run daily backups so at worst I would have lost a days worth of stuff, not the end of the world. Lucky for me I have an extra Mac mini that is my daughters and I was able to open them both up and swap drives (my hard drive actually is in tact!), its just that the mini will not boot. When I plug it in the fan just starts to spin very loudly.

So at least until Friday I can use the spare mini and still have all my data 100% intact. Then I can transfer it over to the iMac and give my daughter back her computer. I hate to take it away but my working is more important than her playing on Disney websites.

So strangely these items that were destroyed were plugged into a good surge protector and even stranger there were about a half dozen other items (2 USB hard drives, 2 monitors and another computer and 2 sets of speakers) that did not get damaged in any way.

So the lesson here is…well I do not know. I thought a surge protector was supposed to protect. At least I have a backup and the data is safe, the money sucks to lose but I do not want to have to lose my stuff, between family photos, banking, music and hundreds of other little things I really rely on having my computer.

Lightning Stay Away!