BookFinder.com Journal

Earthquakes, along with bad traffic and high home prices, are one of the inconveniences we put up with for living in the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. While they make for good conversation fodder when talking to inexperienced out-of-towners, we don’t spend much time thinking about them. Californians grow up trained in earthquake preparedness: duck-and-cover drills in school, earthquake safety kit assembly instructions advertised to adults. Earthquakes happen once in a blue moon. You deal.

My wife and I were loudly jolted awake at 4:42 AM, as the house shook for a few seconds. Car alarms went off around the neighborhood. Startled, we got out of bed to put on street clothes (so we could exit the house if needed) and inspect the house for any damage. We had a few things fall (e.g. a small metal curio knocked four feet away on the ground from where it initially stood), but we were fine, as were our bookshelves (which we haven’t bolted to the wall, though we’re eternally meaning to).

At 4:45 AM, my phone beeped as I got an automated text message: BookFinder.com was having database problems. We checked on our neighbors, walked around outside our house looking for damage, and then went online to follow up on BookFinder.com. A call to Charlie indicated that yes, he was fine, and that he was already working on it. Puzzlingly, the site seemed to be working fine. Charlie quickly determined that one of our database servers had unexpectedly rebooted shortly after the earthquake, suggesting that the earthquake must have caused the power to cycle, causing about two minutes of partial site downtime. We’ll be looking into this later today.

We’re headed back to bed now, not having felt any immediate aftershocks. Good night. (Signing off at 5:43 AM).