As many of you know, I work for POLITICO in the DC area. Yes, this is the same area that experienced an 5.8 magnitude earthquake this week on Tuesday. Now we are staring down Irene, a hurricane that is threatening much of the east coast. So as you can imagine, the ColdFusion posts this week have been sparser than I would have liked. It has made landfall this morning in North Carolina and his heading up the coast. We suspect (that is my family and I) it will hit us tomorrow morning. Our previous residence was the Fort Worth area, where tornados were the weather threat to worry about. It has been about 9 or 10 years since we have experienced a full force hurricane, when we lived in Florida. In Texas we’d get the remnants of hurricanes that hit land and was on land for a few hundred miles. Of course, I lived in South Florida when Hurricane Andrew hit. That was a bit stronger, because it hit as a Category 5. I was not in the eye, but the damage was incredible.
So, being part of a news company (POLITICO, WJLA, TBD) all of our developers are on “emergency” standby, so that we can still deliver news in case of server issues. Needless to say, I won’t be whipping up Hurricane Irene related ColdFusion code examples for this event. Plus, I have stuff to secure outside!
I did remember an interesting post from another hurricane prone developer, in which he wrote a cool tracker for his hurricane tracking needs (or fun). Although this post is specific to his hurricane, it could be easily modified for the hurricane of your choice. Check out Ray Camden’s Hurricane Gustav tracker code from almost exactly 3 years ago (Thursday, August 28, 2008).
For those of you with me from the Carolinas up throughout the east coast, hunker down and be safe. If you are supposed to evacuate, do so! Had my stepmom not worked for the local hospital during Hurricane Andrew we would have promptly evacuated. There are no hurricane parties worth your life. Ok, that’s the end of my Public Service Announcement. I will likely tweet (@askBenore) our experience and when we are finally on the other side of the storm.