We had quite the lightning storm last night, and apparently we took a direct hit. I wasn't home at the time, but my wife described it as "the whole house shook". The burglar alarm went bonkers, making some loud, screechy sound that has nothing to do with its normal alarm noise. My wife pried the box open and pulled the taps off the battery, killing it. Later on, I disconnected the wires labeled "AC" from the motherboard. Technically, I'm renting this box from my alarm company. I wonder who pays for lightning strike damage? Probably me, although I can always say "so, should I call your competition, who'd be happy to install a new alarm for free to have my continuing business?" That would be my aforementioned father's typical strategy.

Other casualties seem to include:

- the telephone in the bedroom (but the bedroom television is fine)
- my Linksys WRT54G router (talks to the inside, but not the outside; DSL modem works fine)
- possible damage to the Mac
--- booted normally
--- after logging in, spent two minutes hanging out without drawing the top menu bar, but did draw the time and a few right-corner icons
--- complained that it didn't know the time
--- after I plugged the Mac directly into the DSL modem, it found the time and appears to be working
- HD-TiVo is utterly dead, not even the fan spins up
- My Onkyo receiver's audio section appears to be dead
--- the front-panel display is fine
--- the relays appear to be clicking haphazardly
--- it smells like burnt electronics
- DVD player and main TV set appear to be fine
- Edit: the cordless phone's base station appears to be damaged as well.
--- The built-in answering machine still plays back messages.
--- The handsets can't find the base station.

This moderately annoys me because I went out of my way to have my TV antenna and satellite dish properly grounded. Of course, maybe the lightning hit was to one of the tall trees next door, and we just got whatever current splashed around. That might explain why seemingly unrelated bits of equipment were damaged.

Anyway, the TiVo, receiver, TV, and DVD player were plugged into a "Monster Power PowerCenter HTS800", which allegedly includes a "$150,000 connected equipment warranty and lifetime PowerCenter™ product warranty". Looks like I'll be investigating how to use that warranty.

Questions for the group:

- Should I do anything in particular to my Mac? Any easy way to check if my hard drives are correcting lots of errors behind my back and it's time to replace them?

- Any experience dealing with Monster about their warranty? I knew, going in, that Monster products were crap, but it was a cheap power strip and the warranty seemed to be more valuable to me than any amount of actual surge surpression.

- What's the current home router / wireless gateway of choice? Still the WRT54G?