Minding the Store

Cheryl is traveling between Boston and New York today, and is apt to have erratic-at-best internet connections. So that means that I need to do more for SF Awards Watch than kill spam, which is my main work for the site as one of its editors. As it happens, some awards news from Japan came in overnight. We don't like letting these things sit around, so I did my best to craft it into a site posting. I reckon that if I made any significant style mistakes, Cheryl will be able to fix them when she can next get to an internet connection. In the meantime, the nominations have been posted as soon as we saw them, which is part of our self-appointed job at SFAW.

I admit to being slightly grumpy a few weeks ago, right after Cheryl got back to the USA, when we got a complaint about a comment spam that had been posted for a few hours. The filters don't catch everything, especially with human spam factories out there, so it's up to the human editors (Cheryl and me) to swat spam posts that slip through the filters. But we have to sleep sometimes, and particularly when we're both in the same time zone, there are a few hours each day when the spammers can get through until we wake up and look at what's come in overnight.

Worldcon Chairs in Locus

I understand that the next issue of Locus will have the Worldcon Chairs Photo from Nippon 2007, which will of course include me. Even better, they're using one of the photos that Lisa took, and she'll get a photo credit and a small payment. Good thing she used the higher-resolution setting on the camera, I reckon.

Feeling the Earth Move

Well, that was interesting. A reasonably-sized earthquake just shook the Bay Area. The initial reports have the magnitude at 5.6 (moderate) and the epicenter being northeast of San Jose, but I certainly felt it here at my office in the hills above San Mateo. It felt like a sort of rolling sensation for up to ten seconds or so. Areas built on fill land reported longer rocking and rolling. News reports have things having come off shelves in San Jose-area grocery stores. The epicenter is closer to my house than it is to my office, so I'll be interested in seeing if anything went wrong at home.

No Harm Done

When I got home, I had a look around. Despite having numerous opportunities for things to fall off of shelves, nothing was obviously knocked over.