With this seriously rare phenomenon happening, sometimes we songwriters forget what havoc Mother Nature can wreak on us. Here are a few things you might try to keep a little thing like this from becoming something serious, instead of just a cool thing to look at after dark if you live in northern areas.
DON'T FRY YOUR MODEM
Many people don't realize that things like lightning and/or solar flares can affect their dial-up Internet connection. Three modems later, I am a lot more careful when I hear that things that can affect my electrical or phone service are coming, and remember to unplug my computer from the phone jack after I get offline. A good surge in electricity can burn out that little connection at the back of your modem where the phone plug goes, and the modem will test normal, but you won't be able to login to your ISP. It is actually really easy to install a new one yourself-it took a tech dummy like me $21 and about 10 minutes, including uploading a new driver and changing a few settings to get myself back online once I got the new component home. You probably won't crash your hard drive and lose important lyrics or song bits if this happens, but it could knock you offline in the middle of an important upload to a contest website, or make you lose whatever you were working on if you are online while working on some music and haven't done a save in the last few minutes. Best policy is to just get offline as soon as you see lightning outside if you are using dialup, and make sure you unhook that phone connection from the wall. If we have any power outages because of the solar flare, you might experience the same problems. Best to just try jamming around with your acoustic for a little bit, at least until the atmosphere calms down again.
PLAY ACOUSTIC
If you are in the middle of a gig and the power goes out on you, if there is still light in the place, the gig may not be a total loss. Many bands have just made sure they had some acoustic instruments along as standbys, and the drummer can just play a little quieter until your unplugged set is over. The same can really go for studio time-hopefully your agreement can allow for a reschedule for a time when the power is back on, or they will let you have a free hour or whatever passes by if it looks like things will be back on quickly and it is worth sticking around. The important thing is to be prepared in case something like this happens, especially when you know that a storm of some sort is imminent and you have something musically important scheduled.
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