…And I was only 5 miles from the epicenter.

I was getting up from the couch when it started on Oct 31 at 03:04:54 UTC; Incidentally all 4 members of my family were in the room so we and our dog crammed ourselves in the door to the computer room/guest room. I’d say the largest thing moving was us - Those Gordons!

For most of the teenagers in California this was their first large earthquake. The experience itself was a little freaky. First came small tremors then it rolled and everything shook violently for a few seconds, the house creaked some, and a few seconds later it subsided and got out the flashlight in case the aftershocks proved themselves worthy of knocking out a few underground transformers. We took a minute to collect ourselves. The phone lines were overloaded at the moment and after a few tries we got through to family members. Everyone was just a little shaken up except my Great Grandmother (who’s doing fine! in case your wondering, even at 92) who lived in a Mobile home and things weren’t exactly laid out the best. Some portraits fell and cracked. Lamps, books, a bookshelf that wasn’t bolted to the desk and one of those old CRT clunky monitors fell. Fortunately it worked and everyone was fine after an hour and a half of clean-up.

The USGS site (United States Geology Service - http://usgs.gov/ ) has some nifty map services with earthquake data overlayed; Here’s a USGS image depicting the earthquakes within the last week:

The big yellow square was the big 5.6 and the smaller square right in the middle of the larger yellow square was a 3.7 aftershock just about an hour ago from the time of this post (5 PM Pacific Time)

Recently I found myself updating my modifications / plugins to the GNU/GPL License. I’ve been asking myself why? And I think the answer to that is because it’s such a good way to share your experience, knowledge, and insight with the rest of the world and at the same time breeding a new generation of programmers through useful examples. I always knew there was a bigger part of me that just wanted to help people. What better way to do it than through the “most free” license out there?

After a month and a half long donation drive and 2 weeks of waiting, ordering, and waiting, it is finally here. The new NCAAbbs Server (Actually two if you want to get technical) will fix our load issues with massive crowds and bring stability to the server for several years.

(Each image links to a ultra hi-res image)

And here’s a breakdown of the costs for the new server:

Annual Hosting (current server) ———–588.00
(4) Hard Drives Raptor 10K RPM 150Gb—–739.96
(4) 1Gb Memory Sticks——————–279.96
(2) Xeon Quad Core Intel Procs————703.98
(1) SuperMicro Rack Server Cluster——–1489.99

We’ll be upgrading to a 4U Rack at our datacenter (They’re all out of 2U’s) and setup one of the servers to “master” and the other two to “slaves” with replication technologies. I’ll also be back porting some MyBB 1.4 code for this special occasion (The master/slave technologies)

If everything goes well this should be up within the next few weeks; If you want to stay updated check out the NCAAbbs forum here: http://www.ncaabbs.com - Updates will be in the “Lounge -> Sports Bar Main” forum.

Feel free to ask questions below and I’ll be happy to answer.