Howdy all.

Darkmatter.NI hope you continue to improve.

Good evening all from brassed off from Bolivia (see below)
DMNI it's great to hear that you are progressing well and let's hope that your 'miracle cure' becomes reality. Just a word of warning though - I have had several friends with life limiting problems that have been remitted - one (despite advice) felt so liberated he went out and bought himself a high powered motorbike. He got so excited that a heart attack finished him off - I believe that if he had readjusted to his new found lease of life a little more slowly he might be here today.

Right - Brassed off! So there I am this evening crunching a wodge of Betas (6 threads 12 hours completed) on my 27" iMac when the local power company decided to switch me off for 5 minutes. No problems with the Lappys but the iMac powered down (and yes - I do have a UPS (Useless Piece of Sh*t)). When it returned to life I was horrified to find that all Beta WUs had returned to Zero because the project failed to put in check points. That has cost me 72 hours or so of wasted CPU time. Needless to say that the air turned blue and my partners grasp of Anglo Saxon has improved remarkably. Grrrrrrr

No DMNI I don't get too many power outages although I reckon that the voltage fluctuates a bit. It's just rather difficult to judge whether it is us (domestic system) or them (Elec supply company). Generally it is the latter.
The distribution here is 3 phase and every off take has it's own transformer (mounted on the electricity pole - generally a tree trunk). A few months ago CRE (the electricity supplier) turned up and disconnected the transformer to replace it resulting in an unannounced outage of 6 hours. I tried to explain to them that we have 2 large freezers containing a lot of food but they just shrugged their shoulders and said it would be ready when it was ready. This was the height of summer with outdoor temperatures in the high 30s. Fortunately by keeping the freezers closed we were OK but I must admit we were worried.

Good morning everyone.

DMNI It is good that you are making progress, even if the heart wants let the brain keep in control.

Thargor & Rod. Agree somewhat on the UP S***, they would work for the NT4 boxes reasonably well (AKA no major alarms). The ones used for the Unix boxes rather less useful (never powered down gracefully, this would provide an entertaining couple of hours).

Good news DarkMatter.NI. Let's hope things continue to improve.
RTS48 - it sounds like your UPS is a waste of electricity, except it's probably providing a degree of smoothing, even if its battery is scr*wed. Time for a replacement? Tesla Powerwall?