Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Last night, Leslie and I watched “Nerdcore Rising.” This was easily the funniest music documentary I’ve seen since “We Sold Our Souls for Rock ‘n’ Roll.” It follows MC Frontalot on his first tour. The tour starts off slow, with small groups in little bars in the south, but it ends in a big way, with a big show at a video game convention. Along the way, they interview fans and others about Nerdcore rap.

Now it’s time for a little braggadocio
while I swing my arms like Ralph Macchio.

This is an obscure little movie, but Netflix has it, and it’s definitely worth watching. And besides, the beginning of the DVD version announces:

This film has been modified from its original version. It has been made more awesome for this screen.

And what could be better than that?

There have been a lot of earthquakes this afternoon. In particular, there have been these three big ones:

M7.3 2009/10/07 23:13:49 -13.145 166.297 33.3 VANUATU
M7.7 2009/10/07 22:18:26 -12.554 166.320 35.0 SANTA CRUZ ISLANDS
M7.8 2009/10/07 22:03:15 -13.052 166.187 35.0 VANUATU

In the Earthquake Notification Service, also known as My Pet Project, subscribers can pick their own location and magnitude criteria for notification, but the general rule is that the larger the earthquake, the more people want to know about it. And anything over M7 will generate a lot of mail. So I went and poked through the logs to see just how many messages it’s sent in the last few hours.

It’s currently not quite 7:00PM here in Los Angeles. I looked at logs back to 2:00PM, which is about when these big events started coming through the system. And the notification system has sent 642,590 messages in that time. That averages out to about 36 messages a second for five hours. No wonder some ISPs with automatic filters have blocked our mail servers as suspected spam sources.

Just for perspective, the system has sent about 775,000 messages in the past 24 hours. And this is not a record. The 24-hour record for the system is 943,833 messages in 24 hours, and that was set last Saturday.

Automated systems can be pretty stupid sometimes. There is some earthquake activity going on in the Gulf of California right now, and it’s generating a fair number of messages through the Earthquake Notification Service (aka, “My Pet Project“). In the messages, it gives the location of the earthquake relative to some local landmarks and cities in the area. And now I’m getting back nasty messages from various mail systems like this:

This email has violated the RACIAL DISCRIMINATION.
and Quarantine entire message has been taken on 8/4/2009 2:33:29 PM.
Message details:
Sender: ens@usgs.gov;
Recipient: redacted
Subject: 2009-08-03 18:40:50 REVISED: (Mw 6.2) GULF OF CALIFORNIA
29.4 -113.7

Or this:

A message sent from “ens@usgs.gov” to “redacted” with a subject of “2009-08-03 18:40:50 REVISED: (Mw 6.2) GULF OF CALIFORNIA 29.4 -113.7” has been blocked as it contains profane language.

All this because the earthquake happened to be near the town of Guerrero Negro.

I haven’t seen anything like this since the last time we had a big earthquake near the Virgin Islands.

I checked this morning, and the subscriber list for the USGS Earthquake Notification Service passed 150,000 at about 07:34 GMT on Monday morning. This is a momentous occasion. I never imagined that something I invented could be so popular, useful, or entertaining. It’s come a long way from its beginnings as my Pet Project.

The earthquake last Sunday evening brought in about 1,500 new subscribers for the Earthquake Notification Service (aka: My Pet Project). The subscriber list now stands at just over 148,000. I’m still planning on having a party when it reaches 150,000, which will likely be sometime around mid to late June.

This weekend, Susan and I went to San Diego to see “Star Trek: The Exhibition” at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. This was a show of costumes, models and props from the “Star Trek” TV shows and movies. A lot of the artifacts from the original series are lost, but they had a lot of things from the more recent shows.

On the way in, Susan had to stop for a photo-op with the life-sized standup of Charles Lindbergh that was in front of The Spirit of St. Louis.

Inside the exhibit, they insisted on no photography, so we don’t have pictures of us on the bridge of the Enterprise or in the transporter. I did sneak one picture of the Guardian of Forever from “The City of the Edge of Forever”. Still, it was a fun time.

We also wandered around the rest of the museum. We saw a reproduction of the Red Baron‘s airplane, as well as his collection of medals from the war.

Afterward, we went to visit with my father for dinner at his place.

So I was out at lunchtime, walking to the store to get some food for dinner. And I felt the ground move. At first, I thought it was a small earthquake, since it didn’t feel like much. But then I saw the big crane at the construction site on San Pasqual swaying. And I immediately turned around and headed back to the office.

When I got there, I realized that the quake was much larger than I’d thought. And I was greeted by this scene of chaos and devastation in my office. Oh the penguinity…

On Monday night, Susan and I went to the Egyptian Theater and American Cinematheque in Hollywood for a screening of “The Space Movie“. This was part of the Mods and Rockers Film Festival. I’m not sure what the connection is there, but that’s no matter.

The film was put together in 1979 for the 10th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. It was made up of film from NASA and was meant as a tribute to the achievements of the space program. While much of this film has been seen in other places over the years, the real draw was that Buzz Aldrin was going to be there to introduce the film and to talk a bit about his experiences. This means that I have now seen three of the twelve people who walked on the Moon, and also the only one who was also a guest star on “The Simpsons“.

I rode the train down to Susan’s office on Wilshire and we headed up to Hollywood from there. We had dinner at the Pig ‘n Whistle on Hollywood Boulevard, which was amusing. It’s a nice bit of Hollywood history, and it’s right next door to the Egyptian Theater.

After dinner we headed over to the movie. This was the first time I’d ever been inside the main auditorium of the Egyptian. It was impressive. The film was good, although a lot of it had been squashed down to TV resolution, which just doesn’t look all that good when it’s projected on a big screen. And sadly, Buzz Aldrin said that he doesn’t do autographs, so all of us who’d brought books, posters, etc to get signed were all disappointed. But he still had some funny stories to tell, so we had a good time.

After all, one never knows what the day will bring:

Created by OnePlusYou

Kilauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawai’i is having some activity in the summit crater. This is the first time there’s been anything going on there since 1982. And back then, webcams hadn’t been invented yet. Yesterday, I read that Hawaii Volcanoes National Park had been closed and evacuated due to the sulfur dioxide. I called one of the volcano program people I know in Menlo Park to see how their web site was doing with the increased traffic they get when stuff like this gets in the news. I’d gone to a meeting with them last year to talk about ways to deal with web traffic surges. She said it was doing all right, and that I should check out the Halema’ua’u webcam in the morning, just before the sun came up in Hawai’i. The volcano observatory guys had said that the glow of the lava was visible.

So here it is.