October 17, 2014
Dear Everyone:
For those who pay attention to such things, today is the 25th
Anniversary of the
Loma Prieta Earthquake, which shook the
Bay Area and,
briefly, stopped the
World Series in 1989.
It happened at 5:04 PM and I, sort of, slept through it.
Now, you might ask, “How could you sleep through a major earthquake?”
Well, I wasn’t asleep, exactly, I was just sort of dozing.
You dozed through a
6.9 quake?
That’s some doze you got there.
OK, let’s review what we know about earthquakes:
You have two rock formations, and they’re married, and they hate each
other, but they’re staying-together-for-the-sake-of-the-children.
Then something happens.
He forgets to put the toilet seat down,
again.
She puts
anchovies in the salad,
again.
Whatever. Something causes
them to slip a little further apart and, as so often happens in these
relationships, that releases a tremendous amount of
kinetic energy that
goes POW!!! in all directions; up, out, down.
And that’s called The
P-Wave.
Not only because it goes POW!!! but because it is the
Primary Wave. It is
immediately followed by The S-Wave, so-called because it is the
Secondary Wave, and because it
is the Surface Wave.
The S-Wave acts just like the ripples that happen when you toss the
Proverbial Pebble into the Proverbial Pond.
The ripples take place on the surface of the pond.
The S-Wave also travels on the surface of the Earth.
And, for the record, the S-Wave travels at approximately 5 miles
per second slower than the P-Wave.
That’s how seismologists begin to figure out where the
epicenter
was, by computing the difference in time.
At about 5:04 PM, I was in my
vanpool, heading home, dozing in my seat
because I was tired and it wasn’t my week to drive.
We were inside the
Caldecott Tunnel.
The S-Wave travelled right over us.
I “woke up” when we came out of the tunnel and everyone started talking
about the cars on the other side of the freeway, which had all stopped.
Evidently, when you’re driving a car and a quake hits, it feels
remarkably like a blown tire.
So the drivers all stopped and got out to see what had happened
to their tires.
(Technically, when heading in that direction at that time of day, all
the cars would be travelling at a very slow speed, i.e., crawling toward
the tunnel, so it wasn’t a safety hazard to stop.)
Later, when we got to our usual pickup/drop-off point a waiting spouse
reported that we had just experienced “a significant quake”, an opinion
confirmed by my car’s radio as I slowly worked my way home.
All the traffic lights were knocked out, rendering every
intersection a 4-way stop.
Other than that, things were pretty much OK when I (finally!) got home.
Apart from the fire in the
Marina district, of course, the
freeway that collapsed, and the
Bay Bridge that fell down and only
recently underwent some replacing.
In other news…
I am still e-a-s-i-n-g my way into using the New
Laptop.
I have installed almost all of the necessary software and will
soon be transferring files and documents from the Old Laptop to the New
Laptop, via the ever-trusty
USB “flash” drive.
In the meantime, I have made two valuable discoveries:
Valuable Discovery Number One.
You don’t really have to deal with that new “Start Screen” if you don’t
want to. Just click (or
“tap” if you actually use the touch screen) the “Desktop” Tile and
presto! You’re back to the
good-old desktop that we all know and love, and everything is “back to
normal.”
Valuable Discovery Number Two.
There is a way to shut down that annoying
password protection when you
first turn the computer on.
Naturally, no one should use this for a Company, or Business, computer.
But for a laptop, like mine, that is only used at home, for
more-or-less personal stuff, that password is just a nuisance.
You might think, “But it protects against theft.”
Really? A thief breaks into
my home, starts loading up with valuables, sees the laptop, and thinks
to himself, “Hey! I’d better
stop and check to see if it’s password-protected before I take it with
me.” Like, that’s going to
happen. Plus, you can always
turn the password requirement back on if you’re going to be using said
laptop at the public library (one of my favorite spots) for a while.
Just as long as you can remember what the password is, of course.
Love, as always,
Pete
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