A (very) interesting week

After the quake that shook well all East Coast of the US, now we must prepare for a hurricane. Irene is a huge storm that looks like is going to sweep through the whole East Coast, despite mellowing down to a hurricane category 1 storm. The storm is suppose to arrive in the Chesapeake are (southern MD) around 2 AM tomorrow with winds up to 80 mphs. It's 10 am here and already is started raining...no winds yet..but probability of flooding is quite high. Now i just need to keep my fingers crossed and hope that the storm will not do significant damage, as monday I need to get to NYC and fly back to Europe out of JFK airport. We will see..

My first earthquake experience

Yes, it had to happen sooner or later. Did not happen while I was in Japan or in California, but here on the East Coast. I was in the house addition (1st floor) while the house started rocking. At first, I though that a big truck/SUV was entering the garage underneath the house. However, when the wall clock started to shake and make sounds from its pendulum I knew that this is serious. It took me a couple of seconds to decide between crouching under the table and rushing to the other end of the room to stop this wall clock from dropping to the ground. Eventually, I just froze for 3 seconds in the middle of the living room to think things through. those moments felt like ages, everything dilated and it was all unclear. That saying that your life flashes your eyes is not true...but you just fill like you are making a big leap into something new. Finally, when this revelatory moment passed by, I just sat on my knees on the floor and waited for the jolts to stop. Then started to shout through the (huge) house looking for the others. My knees were still a bit weak and i felt like donating some adrenalin away but it did not show. Pheww...good to put it behind me. And also thank God I wasn't anywhere on the 20th floor or something like that.

CCleaner for Mac

Got excited to see that the famous Crap Cleaner which is and has been forever in my Windows toolkit made the trip to the other side. As i morph more and more into an avid mac user, this makes me happy. HAd some alternatives, some even better, but also a bit dangerous in terms of tweaking registry entries (especially since from my experience things are far more complicated under mac osx than win), CCLEANER came through.