This wasn’t the first quake I’ve been in. I come from central California, after all, where earthquakes were pretty much a fact of daily life. But many of my co-workers here had never experienced an earthquake ever before, and there was much confusion and puzzlement on their parts. While my cube mate sat at his desk and looked around with a befuddled look on his face, I sat and blithely coded away, barely noticing that things were shaking. My cubemate said, "What’s going on? Is this an earthquake?" I said, "Yep," and pointed out that it probably felt a lot worse than it was, since we’re on the seventh floor of a nine-story building. When the Loma Prieta quake hit northern California in 1989, I was working on the second floor of an old building on the UC Davis campus; I remember how much the building swayed and rolled even then. I also remember looking up at the other programmer and saying, "I really hope that quake was pretty close by."

Later that day, of course, we saw the images of the Marina District of San Francisco engulfed in flames, the collapsed of I-880, the broken Bay Bridge, and so on. I am glad that yesterday’s quake — the strongest that this area has experienced in over fifty years — caused so little damage. Every time that something like this happens, of course, people start worrying about the upcoming "Big One" that will plunge the entire west coast of the United States into the Pacific Ocean, turning Nevada into beach front property. I’ve been hearing about the "Big One" for my entire life; I suppose that someday it might happen, but it’s been imminent for over thirty years at least. It’s kind of hard to maintain a state of terrified contingency for that long a period of time.

Aside from the quake, this week has been relatively free of disaster. Somewhat surprising, in light of the fact that we released our new platform last night, and, aside from some configuration issues on our QA server that prevented Netscape from being able to see half of our product for two or three hours, it went quite smoothly. The product was released in just under ninety minutes; certification took until 3:30 in the morning, but at the end of it the product was fully certified, with no outstanding critical or high priority defects.

There’s no rest for the wicked in this handbasket, though. Next week we begin the process of porting one of our features from MySQL to Oracle. This will be quite a challenge; it’s a feature that we pulled off the web and implemented on our servers without really fully understanding the full schema behind it, so part one of the process will be a series of meetings — online, on the phone, and in person — to explore the schema in MySQL and rebuild it in Oracle. Then migrating the data. Then going into the PHP code and reconfiguring the connections to work with Oracle (which has been one of my own specialties in this company). This means at least one, possibly two, more weeks up here in Portland. Fortunately, this project promises to be a lot of fun — as opposed to this past release which really left a bad taste in my mouth.

And the plans for the Europe trip are moving along. I’ve made my flight reservations now; I’ll be leaving in early May and flying into Dublin, then flying back home from Amsterdam in early June. My itinerary — rough though it is at this point — includes Ireland, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and Amsterdam. Okay, it needs work, I know, but things are slowly coming together.

The house is proceeding quickly as well. I’m told that they’re going to start putting up the sheetrock soon; we’ve chosen the color of Corian for the kitchen countertops; and we’re soon going to reach the stage where we realize how bad an idea it was to put all of the outlets where we did.

I miss being at home during the week and being able to drive out to the lot in the evenings to look at the progress of the house. Perhaps there will be another quake in Portland…