Ike and Schlock
Posted September 11th, 2008 by Sandra TaylerBy Sandra Tayler
Hurricane Ike will be hitting Houston in the early hours of Saturday morning. Houston is where the servers which host Schlock Mercenary are located. The good news is that Ike is moving fast and should blow through quickly, thus having less time to batter Houston. Bookworm tells us that down time is unlikely and assures us that everything is backed up in multiple locations so that if down time does occur things can be restored quickly as soon as internet is available again. I can only hope that all the people in Houston are as prepared as Bookworm and our server center. If they are, then they’ll all be fine.
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September 11th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
I wish my abode was as secure as those servers. I live in the deep forest northeast of Houston.
OTOH, my site’s servers are in California…
September 11th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
lol. Schlock hasn’t fought a hurricane yet. This should be interesting.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
redneckgajin - I’m just north of downtown Houston.
Just hope they don’t get an earthquake AND a hurricane.
September 11th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
JoshuaTerrell - I’d hate to see what effects a plasma cannon would have on a hurricane. Especially if it was fired long enough…
September 11th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
AlexS: Thinking about the physics of what drives a tropical cyclone, I suspect firing a plasma cannon at its base would intensify it, and firing across the top would weaken it.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
I’d suspect that a plasma cannon wouldn’t affect it. You’d have to come up with something that could affect the entire diameter of the eye at once.
Even a nuclear explosion might not affect it, because the blast would have to be approximately forty miles across to do anything.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Brother #2 was supposed to come in to town for niece #5’s wedding on Saturday. Not gonna do that with Ike passing through.
By the way, Howard — the Blast Off! went as planned, but I did more shooting of the loud kind than the pictorial kind. Got a few images, but nothing to write home about. I’ll do it again before winter and send along images of that one.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
vermonter wishing y’all in texas good luck in riding out the storm, i’ve hauled freight in texas and found good folks there.
“gunner”
(howard, i’ve been getting “schlock merc” in my e-mail since you opened that option, along with chris muir’s “day by day”, i’m not going to “unsub” either one but i find that i still like to come here to the site for the reader comment and your remarks.)
September 11th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
Houston’s fairly well prepared for this sort of thing. Dallas/Ft.Worth is, unfortunately not used to seeing something just shy of a Cat-1 showing up on our doorstep. :-D
As for the nuclear blast theory, they’ve theorized that something like 6-10 pony bombs (1-5kT yield) detonated at a uniform interval apart from each other around the hurricane will disrupt the airflow and snuff it. Theory there- but nobody’s willing to detonate the bombs, obviously.
September 11th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
I suspect that the ‘cure’ would be worse than the ‘disease’!
September 12th, 2008 at 12:30 am
Do you have a hurricane insurance on Schlock delivery? :)
After having the datacenter explode, that might be quite useful…
Explosion, Hurricane - so next would be an earthquake, I assume - maybe buy another insurance? ;)
Followups:
- Meteorite strike (call insurance?)
- Flood (My marble desktop globe tells me, Houston’s near the sea :) - call the army for doing something useful for once - like securing people from sunk houses?)
- Riot (call Schlock!)
- Alien Invasion (call Schlock again! :) )
- Microwave Satellite (call Schlock? - and be sued for destruction of state property -> join Schlock? ;) )
uh - seems I played too much Sim City when I was younger ;)
(I assume you already had the lightning strikes - into the earthwire :) )
September 12th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
bkwm: I know this well; BTW, thanks for the fact that the laptop you dropped in my lap has a fully functional dialup modem. I expect to use it shortly…
September 13th, 2008 at 12:38 am
Our business general contractor has an ocean view home in Houston. Last time we talked to him (a couple days ago) he said he had sent his wife to D/FW, had boarded up his windows, and knew how to swim.
Guess that means he’s planning to ride it out.
September 13th, 2008 at 8:14 am
When the news tells you that if you are staying Galveston to write your social security number on your arm, you know it’s a bad choice to stay…
September 13th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
A half-dozen mini-nukes in a hurricane are no big deal. It’s an air-burst, so they won’t generate much fallout, and what little does get created will rain out immediately and be diluted in the ocean.
Anyone in a boat in the immediate vincinity won’t have a fun time, but anyone that close to a hurricane *already* has a death-wish, so it doesn’t matter.
September 14th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Well, I wake up and Fox News is reporting that the utility power is totally down in the greater Houston area, and yet Schlock is still running…
Did you already go to Plan B and not announce it? And if not, you might want to do it on Sunday when traffic is lighter.
If everything is already running on backup generators (the Telco, the ISP’s, and the Datacenter) it only takes one failure to knock down all the dominoes. Been there, built that.
September 14th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I think you could just use gravitics to hold all the particles of the storm in place for like, long enough for the energy imbalance that is inherent in the formation of a hurricane to balance, and then just let all the water particles drop at once. Of course you would have to do this before it hits dry land, or New Orleans gets a repeat performance.
September 14th, 2008 at 10:53 am
Schlock was down for a while, for me - i tried to suss out if there was an alternate location, but couldn’t find one. Glad to see y’all are back up and running! I did find Howard’s blog pages and so forth - but no Schlock. No wapsi square, either… (suffer)
Glad yer back! :D
September 15th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I have several DNS servers across a huge area. During the hurricane, the ones that were being used as primary by most of the BLC group got whacked. I got the primary back online, then additional backups late Saturday.
Then my power was cut on Sunday afternoon, and just came back on again a couple of hours ago.