So it's been a little over a week since Sandy hit the east coast, and I'm still catching up on the tech fallout, which honestly interests me more than it probably should given I live nowhere near the water. My Twitter feed for about five days straight was just people I follow complaining about their apartment buildings having no power, no elevators, and spotty cell signal, which, fair enough, that sounds miserable. But the thing that actually stuck with me as a nerd was watching a chunk of the sites I read every single day just vanish.
Gawker, Gizmodo, io9, Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, the whole Gawker Media stable, went dark for days. So did parts of the Huffington Post. The reason, if you hadn't seen it, is almost comically low-tech for something that knocked out that much of my daily reading: a data center at 33 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan called Datagram had its basement flood. The generators were fine, apparently, but the fuel pumps that feed the generators were down in the basement with the floodwater, so once the tanks that were already up and running ran dry there was no way to refill them without hauling diesel up flights of stairs by hand. Which, from what I read, is literally what a bunch of staff and volunteers ended up doing, buckets and all, trying to keep servers alive for clients they didn't even necessarily know by name. That detail is the part that got me. Not the hurricane, not the flooding itself, just some guy in a stairwell at 2am carrying fuel up ten flights so a gossip blog stays online.
Gawker eventually got itself moved over to a temporary setup (I think on Amazon's cloud, though don't quote me on the exact provider) and was mostly back within a couple of days. Huffington Post did something similar. But a couple of days of total silence from sites that big is not nothing, and it's the kind of thing that makes you realize how much of "the internet" is still just, like, a specific room in a specific building that can get wet.
Which got me thinking about this very blog, which I will fully admit runs on a hosting plan I picked mostly because it was cheap in 2011 and I never bothered switching. I have no idea what floor techpad physically lives on, or what city, or whether there's a guy with a bucket somewhere whose job it is to keep my server running if things go sideways. I should probably know that. I don't. I've got a database backup script that emails me a zip file once a week, and until this week I genuinely thought that was pretty responsible of me.
Anyway, in smaller and much less dramatic news, I finally got to hold an iPad mini at a store on Saturday. It came out this past Friday at $329 for the base model, and I went in fully expecting to think it felt cheap or plasticky compared to the regular iPad, and instead I kind of loved it. It's lighter than I expected in a way that's hard to describe until you're actually holding it — my normal iPad has started to feel like a chore to hold up in bed, and this one doesn't. I'm not buying one, mostly on principle since I already own two tablets and that's an embarrassing sentence to type, but I get why people are into it.
I also want to say, completely unrelated, that I've been half paying attention to the election coverage and Nate Silver's polling model has turned my group chat with two friends from college into an argument about statistics that has gone on for way too many days. One of them does not believe you can meaningfully predict an election with math and keeps calling it "just vibes with extra steps," which is not correct but is a genuinely funny way to put it.
Going to spend part of tonight actually reading through my hosting provider's docs on backups and failover instead of assuming a weekly zip file makes me safe. Overdue, clearly.