devolute.net

I’ve just been sitting here and the whole house shook for about 4 seconds. So, being the geek I am: go internet go! The ever-useful Sheffield Forum tells me that I wasn’t imagining it. Even more surprising is the news there that it was felt as far west as Manchester and that according to my friends who I’m talking to over IM, as far East as Hull. Wierd. They felt it strongly too. More news later, I guess. It’s always interesting to see how the big media (like the BBC) react to this sort of sudden unexpected news.

Update: The BBC have got an initial report here. Got two pals in North London saying they felt substantial shakes.

Update #2: One guy hurt his leg when his chimney fell on him. My Mums piggie bank nearly fell off the telly. That’s it. No doubt the Japanese/San Franciscans are looking on and sneering at us making such a fuss. Unsupprisingly, it was left to b3ta.com to make the defining point.

Sometimes it feels nice to rant against blatant stupidity and get the support of my peers (read: fellow redditors). I’m happy to be upmodded when it’s something I care about. Sad? Well, maybe. But in this case; when it involves media-scaremongering that makes people terrified of their own neighbourhoods (specially when it’s my neighbourhood), I’ll happily take those votes.

Was awoken up this morning by a police officer knocking on my door. He told me there had been “an incident” and wondering if I’d seen anything. As I wasn’t dressed and was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, he figured pretty quickly I hadn’t. Only once I’d got myself sorted and ready to go to work did I discover that the road outside our house was cut off by blue police tape that I had to work my way through to get to work. I figure I was technically in a crime scene!

Apparently a bank-van had been held up by armed men as it refilled a near-by cash machine. I don’t think anyone was hurt, but they made off with a hell-o-a-lotta cash. South Road in Sheffield does seem to be attracting an inordinate amount of police attention recently. I don’t know why, maybe because it’s close enough to the city centre to have targets of value, but far enough from the city centre to be free from CCTV etc. I’m only speculating here. I have absolutely no idea.

The constant rain and subsequent flooding yesterday was pretty amazing. I’m lucky that I live and work on some of Sheffield’s higher ground, so I wasn’t personally effected. However at work we could watch the citys traffic cameras online. Roads either became blocked with traffic, closed off, flooded or in some cases blocked with abandoned cars and flooded. We saw industrial buildings to the North of the town catch fire and Sheffield Forgemasters (who coincidently, I’ve helped develop a website for) were pretty much submerged. I’m now quite familiar with Sheffield and it was eerie to watch recognisable places and structures suddenly acquire their own moats in real time. The local web forum was full of people posting pictures of their homes and offices partially submerged and their cars floating. The roads, bridges and the station is still a mess.

For me, it was also interesting to see how locals made pretty much immediate use of web forums, imageshack pictures, blogs and youtube posts to spread their, sometimes quite scarey, stories.  All in all, a case-in-point example of a so-called Media 2.0 ‘hard news’ day.