I was sitting at a Korean BBQ restaurant in the heart of Cebu City waiting for my dinner to-go order to be made. Staring up at the beautiful ceiling chandelier I could see it swaying slightly, almost rhythmically. The swaying became more obvious and powerful. And then the screams came.

As everyone rushed out the front doors I realized I was experiencing an earthquake. I'm from Florida and we don't get them there. I had been in the Philippines less than 1 month and I was experiencing so many new things, yet I never expected this to be one of them.

Thankfully, no one was hurt at the restaurant that day but I did have to wait until 2 am to gain access to my condo unit.

Since then I've experienced several more earthquakes and, though none have been as scary as that first one, they are always concerning. I've also felt phantom earthquakes everyday since, though the further I get from an actual quake the less intense they are. Because of this I started visiting the Philvocs Earthquake Information website daily to see if there was any activity near me.

I've recently created a python utility to display the earthquake information from the site in CSV format. I plan on using this to create a quake view in my Emacs environment so I can more easily track activity.

The CSV data includes:

• url - url of event map where earthquake occurred (.jpg format)
• datetime - date and time of the event (Philippine Time)
• lat - latitude coordinate (ºN)
• long - longitude coordinate (ºE)
• depth - depth of the earthquake in km
• mag - magnitude of the earthquake
• location - approximate geographic location of the epicenter