As you may or may not have heard on the interwebbytubes, the DC metroplex was rocked by an earthquake that measured 5.8 on the Richter scale this afternoon and was felt as far away as Ontario, Canada. Various and sundry other locales reported the quake as well, from Pittsburgh, PA to Tampa, FL, to Brooklyn and New York, NY. An aftershock measuring 2.8 on the Richter scale was reported a little while later (I don't know how long). This is the second to hit the area in the last couple of years; the quake that occurred in July …

When last I went in for dental work I'd done some planning ahead and made an appointment to get one last problem taken care of, namely, the oldest and first filling in the clinical disaster area known as my mouth that had started leaking a few years ago. So, I went in to see my dentist this morning... after the usual round of novocaine injections and pleasantries Dr. Huang started to drill away the old filling and clean the decay and accumulated cellular garbage out. About halfway through the procedure I started feeling everything. Not because the local gave out …

As you've probably heard on the Net, or maybe on the major news shows (I don't know, seeing as how I don't watch television unless you put a glass of bourbon in my hand and a gun to my head), the network underlying RIM's Blackberry PDAs was offline for a while, which left many people without mobile instant message and e-mail traffic for about a day. Now, I can see how this can be an inconvenience when you're on the Metro or at the store and you need to be on call for something, but if this article is to …

Always double-check what machine you're working on. And always, always make sure your backups are good!

In the state of Alaska, a sysadmin at the department of revenue accidentally reformatted a hard drive that contained information pertaining to a oil fund account worth roughly $38bus.

Yep - billions of US dollars.

For an encore, rather than restore the data for the account from a backup hard drive, he then reformatted the backup drive on top of that - he probably hit the up arrow, changed the device name, and touched it off again. By this time, any sysadmin worth the name would …

Always double-check what machine you're working on. And always, always make sure your backups are good!

In the state of Alaska, a sysadmin at the department of revenue accidentally reformatted a hard drive that contained information pertaining to a oil fund account worth roughly $38bus.

Yep - billions of US dollars.

For an encore, rather than restore the data for the account from a backup hard drive, he then reformatted the backup drive on top of that - he probably hit the up arrow, changed the device name, and touched it off again. By this time, any sysadmin worth the name would …