ARGGGGGHHHH!
Curse you! Why is it that ye Gods always find it necessary to smite down manifested hubris?!
Around 9:30 or 10 last night, there was a brief power outage. After navigating myself in the dark to my study, I found out that although almost all of the housing appliances stopped functioning, thanks to my trustworthy Uninterruptable Power Supply from APC, my computer and my cable modem were both still running, shielded from the power outage. I know that my little UPS has a capacitance for about 3 - 5 minutes of power consumption in blackouts, so to prevent bad things from happening to the computer, I used that time to shut it down. And I waited (I couldn't even cook dinner!). Then the power came back on and all was good. (Except that there was a power spike when it came back on and almost broke my stereo: the surge caused some problems in the electronics in the stereo system, but unplugging it for a while and plugging it back in solved the problem... Except that I need to reset the time on the stereo. They have some sort of internal counter for time, so usually after power outages the stereo would be lagging by exactly the number of minutes the outage lasted. But this time it was hard reset by the power surge.)
I was quite happy at my decision to get an UPS. And quite happy that my computer didn't suffered a hard reboot or anything like that.
And then. Unbeknownst to me until just now when I woke up and came downstairs, there was a power outage for 1 whole hour between 2:50am and 3:50am. There was no surge this time. So the fact that my stereo became one hour out of sync meant that the power went out for an hour. And the fact my computer rebooted at 3:50am tells me when the outage was....
What made me most angry, however, is that I lost about half of a blog post that I was writing. It was about a math puzzle that I was thinking about. I was trying to solve it and write it up at the same time. So I had a background screen process running. Every time I switch out of the process I would save the contents (to some file in /tmp, but nonetheless useful. I started working on it while I was at school. After I got home, before I turned the computer off for the first power outage. I quit screen and dumped whatever I had of the blog entry to my home directory. Later yesterday night I did some more typing about the problem. But since I am at home, I conveniently didn't save any of the new contents I typed.