tanivula: I heard it coming here in Aotea, then the short sharp jolt.

I heard it coming about five seconds before it hit, we felt a single short moderate jolt that woke my wife up. I live fairly close to freitasm who said about he didn't feel it.

Eva888: We did, sudden, strong and sharp. Then felt a very slight one like the earth moved so to speak. Hate them. I saw Ruapehu is in alert level 1 as is White Island.

They usually are. That's just 'some' background volcanic activity, as opposed to nothing (ala Auckland, Rotorua). Ruapehu still has an active crater lake with heating cycles and White Island has been reasonably active for some time now. 

Ngaruahoe sometimes gets a bit of a wobble and moves up to L1 but hasn't done anything since the 1970s. 

gehenna: There was another similar one in Porirua the other day. 3.6ish, 30km shallow. But a very short sharp shock.

Strangely I didn't feel that one, just like @freitasm didn't feel the one last night

Earthquakes are weird things

I'm in Tawa - haven't felt any quakes.

On the bright side, a series of little(ish) quakes means the fault is releasing the tension on it little by little. Its when it saves it all up for one big shake that bad things happen - on fault lines, no news is bad news!

BlueShift:

 

On the bright side, a series of little(ish) quakes means the fault is releasing the tension on it little by little. Its when it saves it all up for one big shake that bad things happen - on fault lines, no news is bad news!

 

That's kind of optimistic in practice.

The energy released in one magnitude 8 quake is equivalent to the energy release of about 4 million magnitude 3.6 quakes. 

So if you had a magnitude 3.6 quake every hour for 400 years, that might release the stress equivalent to one magnitude 8 quake with a return period of about 400 years.  But it's not happening like that (even slow quakes elsewhere are just transferring stress to somewhere the fault is locked).