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Hurricane Irene Threatens US Northeast; Cover Your Assets
jfruhlinger writes "Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the heavily populated U.S. Northeast Corridor. If you work in IT, you know that there are few things that are worse for electronics than water; so, what's your plan? Tom Henderson has come up with a checklist, which sensibly includes backing everything up, twice; not that you have time for it now, but for future reference you might want to consider just moving your whole data center to a location that's been conveniently pre-hardened, like a water tower or a boiler room." Note that Irene has been no joke in the Caribbean; in Puerto Rico (with relatively modern infrastructure), about a third of the island lost power.
If you cannot restore your backups without an Internet connection, you do not have backups.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Wood is a shitty construction material.
Tell that to all the people in Haiti, who still haven't recovered from the earthquake there a couple years ago. Or the people in various other 3rd-world cities where everything's made of concrete and they didn't think earthquakes were a concern until one hit.
Concrete is a terrible construction material, unless you reinforce it with a lot of steel. But steel's expensive compared to plain concrete.