The dark explodes with a yellow light

Last night wasn't fun.

It started badly with a walk in the woods just as the rain started to fall. It picked up in intensity as I reached the half way point and then the entire sky was lit up with a series of lightning flashes. I couldn't remember whether it was more dangerous to be under trees or in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm, but my walk home was nicely split between the two. I counted the seconds between the flashes and the following crack of thunder and worked out that the storm was still a ways off, but I picked up my pace just in case. The air felt oppressive even though the rain was now pelting down, leaving both man and beast wet, muddy and sweaty by the time we got home.

I was looking forward to a sit down, a meander through my blog roll and perhaps a mug of coffee to settle my storm addled nerves.

One problem though. The newpoot was refusing to boot up. I did the usual run of checking the connections at the back, switching off and on quickly, leaving it for a bit and then switching it on unexpectedly with no joy, not even a solitary beep from the power on self test. We worked out that the computer had been left on this afternoon and had gone into hibernation, whereupon it had stayed like some sort of computerized Blue Peter tortoise.

Great.

I eventually tried booting off the recovery cd and quitting the restore process which got me to a desktop where I wrote a backup dvd with The Blogs on it, just in case. I then kicked off a scan disk which called for a reboot which, you've guessed it, wedged the machine again.

Just to make things worse, the internet connection was being seriously weird. I could get an intermittent connection to some sites (blogger and on-line scrabble), but nothing from anywhere else including hotmail, news.bbc.co.uk and the berlin news server.

Fan-bloody-tastic.

I was quite taken aback by my reaction to the lack of connectivity and the problems with the computer. I felt really anxious, snappy and irritable, like an addict denied a fix of crack or an alcoholic waiting for the bar to open. Not good. I was starting to worry about not being able to connect to work in the morning and missing the news and trivia that normally occupies my surfing time. I couldn't even settle to watch tv, without wondering if the connection had come back yet. I went to bed in a fractious mood, and slept badly.

The happy coda, is that the connection was fine in the morning and that a five minute call to the technical support number provided a solution (take the power cord out, hold down the power button for 30 seconds, plug everything back in and reboot).

Thank goodness for that.