Dear Diary

It's the first day of the rest of our online lives: the Diary has turned into a blog, decades of man-years have been poured into our fab new online home, and I'm ready to fire on all cylinders with a really chewy set of postings to celebrate.

And then the lights go out.

In accordance with what I believe Jerry Pournelle christened the Critical Job Detector principle, a crucial piece of equipment has chosen the absolute worst moment to die. In this case, it's my much loved Dell Latitude X1 laptop - and the CJD is functioning to perfection.

Let me first of all hymn my X1. It's getting on for two years old now, and I've written hundreds of thousands of words on it. It's scratched, the keycaps are wearing off, the batteries are heading towards senile impotence, and it's still lovely. Very light, very portable and surprisingly robust, it's silent in use and has just enough of everything to be a proper vade mecum. I watch movies on it, do all sorts of weird networking, run the usual mix of software, and just snap it shut when I'm done in the full expectation that when I prise it open again it'll be eager and willing for more.

Not this time. I'm a long way from home, I've opened it up and it's darker than a raven in a coalmine.

Some fiddling reveals that it's a weak spot I identified when I first acquired the thing. Although the laptop itself is small and neat, it has a bulky power connector that sticks out of the side like a panhandle. "That'll be the first thing to go", I thought at the time - it's almost designed to fail. Because it's so big and so stick-outy, every little tug will put a lot of strain on the place where it enters the laptop; and because - sin of sins! - it's a custom connector I've seen nowhere else, getting a replacement in a hurry will be impossible. Why the designers thought it necessary to take an ordinary round power connector of the sort and make it octagonal, I shall never know.

But the point at which it failed was on a Friday afternoon. The place at which it failed was 400 miles and three days from home, in Edinburgh - a fine city lacking in none of the requirements of civilised living, but sadly missing a well-equipped store of esoteric power connectors born from a fever dream of some oriental engineer. All my spare computers, tools, test meters and other devices of resurrection might as well have been on Mars.

It had failed in the morning, but I hadn't noticed that the laptop was running on batteries until the point when it wasn't. Hey ho.

It took me about half an hour to fix when I finally got home. It's not a pretty fix, and not a permanent one, but it's one I've done before in similar circumstances. I found that the break in the connection was in the cable itself, about an inch from the place where it enters the connector. I cut the cable here, stripped back the outer core to the connector but left about a centimetre of inner core sticking out (this helps prevents the sort of short circuit you can get if you just snip the cable).

Then I took a sharp scalpel and cut along the plastic outer cover of the connector, which I then just pealed off. This revealed two soldered connections, one for the inner, one for the outer, embedded in a semi-translucent epoxy resin. I sanded away the resin above each connector, stripped and tinned the cable from the power adaptor, and then soldered it on. Clip the plastic outer cover on again, a couple of wraps of insulating tape - and done.

This is mechanically awful. Next weekend, which is the next chance I get, I'll remove all of the epoxy filler, move the cable properly inside the body of the adaptor and re-fill it with some new gunk. But it should hold for the next few days, when I and my limping laptop are in Los Angeles for VM World.

The really, really frustating part of all this is that I have somewhere in the region of five and a half thousand spare power supplies in boxes, cupboards, drawers, bags and on shelves. They cover all voltages, all currents, all connectors - except this single darn custom chunk of madness from Dell.

I suspect, in fact, that homo sapiens is merely the means chosen by power supplies to help propagate their species, and that the huge and otherwise inexplicable variation in their form is merely accelerated mutation in order to find the uber-supply in time before we sink under a sea of small black boxes with mutually incompatible ends.