While the quakes are in CA, the East coast appears to be the area that is in a state of emergency, due to unusually cold weather. People are freezing their butts at home and turn on auxiliary radiators which overload the power stations and cause black-outs, scheduled and unscheduled. The computers that don't get switched off and don't crash as a result of unexpected power drops have to be taken down because the air conditioning doesn't work or the power is needed in another building. To give you an idea of the gravity of the situation, even L-Soft's LAWYERS have stopped the meter and are losing valuable, prime billing time twiddling their thumbs at home in desperation! So it is no wonder that I can traceroute to UBVM successfully, but it doesn't return my pings and won't let me TELNET. JHUVM and AUVM appear to be down as well. It seems about half of the computer systems crashed or went berserk, while the other half are too busy recovering from all the problems caused by the first group to actually get much real work done :-) Now looks like the right time to suggest that Congress allocate 0.1% of the SDI budget to building a robust power network so that the country cannot be disabled so easily in time of war :-) Eric