The Bermuda Triangle paid me a visit.

The electricity in this apartment is very strangely wired. My "shop", which is external to the apartment (which is strange enough) is wired (at least partially) on the same circuit with my bedroom and one of my roommate's rooms. Frequently, I have to contend with the power going out when my roommate runs her toaster oven, microwave and refrigerator at the same time, tripping the breaker.

But yesterday morning, something was weird. I walked into my shop and discovered one of my computers was powered off. My PC, of course. I had some files open that I had not saved the previous night, so they were lost. But when I tried to turn the computer on, I got nothing.

Click.

There was a thunderstorm the previous day, not too long after dark - which is extremely rare out here - but there were no ill effects. I was working on the PC while watching the light show off in the distance, and eventually it came to an end. My wife came home and I went inside for the night - everything was fine when I left the computers.

I have a lamp by my bed that is touch-sensitive. To turn it on or off, all I have to do is touch it. Anywhere. It has four settings - dim, medium, bright, and off. Before rolling over to go to sleep, I turned off the light as I do every night.

The next morning (yesterday morning) I woke up to discover that my wife had already left for work, and I noticed my light was on (the dim setting). I thought maybe she turned it on, either accidentally or on purpose, perhaps while kissing me in my sleep before leaving for work. However, last night I connected the dots - the lamp must have turned itself on in response to some weird power glitch, probably in conjunction with whatever turned off my PC.

There is a little switch on the back of the power supply on the PC that cuts the power to the supply (computer power supplies have one circuit that is always on, which enables them to respond to events, like Wake On LAN, or pressing the power button), but turning off this switch effectively turns the supply off, completely.

My BIOS is configured to so that the computer will return to its previous state following a power failure (that is, if the computer is off when power is lost, the computer will remain off after power is restored. If the computer is on when power goes out, the computer will turn back on when power comes back). When I turned the power supply off and back on, the computer immediately powered up.

This suggests to me that whatever brought the computer down was a very unusual event. It left the power supply in a state where it detected a power failure and shut down (at least partially), but did not detect enough of a power failure to realize it needed to restart.

Weird.

The event logs recorded nothing unusual, and my drives all appear to be intact, so I am very relieved that I avoided a disaster. The Mac seemed to be completely unaware of the event, as it was still up and running. But if I learned a (repeated) lesson here, it was that one can never take computers for granted, or save often enough.