A Billion Here...
14:59 Tuesday, 15 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.18°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 36% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 77
Progressive reporting preliminary figures exceeding $1B for losses in Florida due to Helene and Milton.
The $200 million estimate includes what are known as “allocated loss adjustment expenses,” which can include such things as adjuster costs and legal fees.
Yeah, the part where they invoke the "heads I win, tails you lose" rule.
Anyway, I'm no actuary or insurance expert, but that sounds like a lot to me. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's couch change to Progressive.
✍️ Reply by emailLudicrous Speed
14:26 Tuesday, 15 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 79.92°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 34% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 260
Passing the time, as one does, I moved the Sierpinski program over to the Floppy Emu so I could run it on the Apple IIc.
On the IIc, it runs just as it does on Virtual ][, but there's still something visceral about running it on real hardware. I can recall what it felt like forty-some years ago, seeing hi-res graphics being drawn on a 13" Hitachi color TV that I'd bought to use as a monitor.
It felt like, "the future."
I guess what it feels like now is, nostalgia.
But I can definitely recall that feeling of excitement. Nothing excites me about technology anymore. Well, maybe SpaceX and the Super Heavy landing at its launch tower.
Maybe semaglutide. Heh. But nothing about computers. Or tablets.
Or phones.
Anyway, figured I'd go ahead and run it under Beagle Compiler. Whoa! Takes about 7s compiled, about 8x faster, which means it'd run in about 2.5s on the IIe with the SpeedDemon. That was kind of exciting.
There's a little binary called FAST.HPLOT on the compiler disk that probably substitutes an ampersand-routine (a way of calling a machine language routine from BASIC) for the built-in HPLOT command. I'll have to have a look at that.
Anyway, it's a beautiful day today. The kind of day that makes people think of Florida as paradise. Makes you forget about it taking everything you have from you and leaving you homeless. Makes you forget about the cruelty of the state government here.
At least we got that goin' for us.
✍️ Reply by emailWell...
11:07 Tuesday, 15 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 71.8°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 45% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 513
The Yellowstone card does not play well with the McT SpeedDemon accelerator card, even setting its slot to "normal" speed.
It remains somewhat possible that essentially upgrading the IIe to the "enhanced" version may resolve the issue. But the Yellowstone card doesn't require a 65c02, so that isn't the incompatibility.
BMOW points out that there is an incompatibility with an unenhanced IIe and the Yellowstone insofar as the "unenhanced" IIe will not boot from the Yellowstone card automatically. You can issue a keyboard command "PR#n" (where n is the slot number), and it'll boot. The ROM update might be my last hope, if it is compatible at all.
I've got a ROMxe coming, so I'll be able to switch between the "unenhanced" ROM and the "enhanced" ROM.
As I had the IIe configured today, I had the Disk II controller in slot 7, the Yellowstone in Slot 5 and the SpeedDemon in Slot 4. At first, I couldn't boot from the 5.25" floppy, until I recalled I hadn't set the dip switch for Slot 7 to "normal." After I did that it booted right up. Scared me at first, because the drive would spin with a strange sound, and I'd get an "Unable to load ProDOS" error message. I didn't associate that with an accelerator incompatibility at first. How was it able to realize it was a ProDOS disk?
Anyway, once I set the dip switch correctly, it would boot to the ProDOS splash screen, then crash into the monitor. (I didn't pay attention to the memory location. I may do that if the 65c02 and enhanced ROMs don't work.)
Removing the SpeedDemon, I'd get a normal boot from the 5.25" drive, and it did automatically recognize the Floppy Emu with a 32MB hard drive image mounted in Slot 5. So, while it may not boot unenhanced, without a keyboard command, it's otherwise recognized automatically by ProDOS.
I think having the Yellowstone's smartport capability is more useful than having a faster cpu. But the faster cpu makes things more fun. With the smartport, I should be able to boot into Pascal 1.3 from a 3.5" floppy smartport image, and run a script to move everything to the RAM disk and run the OS from there. (The 800K 3.5" floppy is large enough to contain all the files you need to run UCSD Pascal on an Apple II.)
That makes doing anything in Pascal a lot quicker and more convenient, especially compared to using a pair of 5.25" floppies.
But the ideal case would be able to do that with the accelerator. The great advantage of Applesoft as an interpreter in ROM is that you get immediate feedback from any changes in your program. With Pascal, there's moving back and forth between the editor and the compiler. It's almost transparent with the RAM disk and the accelerator; less so without it. But still far better than relying on floppies.
It is something of a small disappointment, but I can't say enough about how valuable it is as a way to occupy my time.
✍️ Reply by emailPlay Along
09:35 Tuesday, 15 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 67.55°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 56% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 92
I've received the new Floppy Emu, so I'm probably going to spend some time with the IIe today, and not devote a lot of time to the Sierpinski program.
But if you want to play along, here's the program as it is with the "RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB IN 190" error. You can copy the text and paste it into this Javascript Applesoft emulator, which doesn't seem to mind the POKE command to get full-screen Hi-Res Page 1 graphics.
It runs a hell of a lot faster than on real hardware.
✍️ Reply by emailLet's See If This Works
08:23 Tuesday, 15 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 61.83°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 36
A risk index from the feds. Testing to see if the link will produce the report. This is for St Johns County, Florida.
Here's Schuyler County, New York, where our "summer home" is.
(Obviously, it worked.)
✍️ Reply by emailAnother Florida Embarrassment
06:56 Tuesday, 15 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 62.67°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 71% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 89
I was wondering when or if we'd hear about how these Florida phosphate mines fared. I'm not sure we'll really know, but it doesn't seem near the scale of the Piney Point disaster, which is still in the process of being closed.
That's to say nothing of all the septic tanks that failed. Again, Florida is flat, so as those septic tanks fill with floodwaters, and it flows out into the leach fields, it just spreads out over the landscape. Some of it eventually flows into the waterways.
Awesome.
✍️ Reply by emailPrepper
06:23 Tuesday, 15 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 63.61°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 463
The audio on this report drops out briefly in a couple of places, but it's illustrative of something important.
If you live in an area that may be prone to flooding (or any disaster), you need to educate yourself on what you will do in the event of a disaster.
This is something the state of Florida and the federal government could do much more, ahead of this, to help fight disinformation. We're going to be dealing with much more of this in the decades to come, and we need to get much better at it, and fast.
At the state level, I'm sure it's not congruent with efforts to "promote growth," but making sure people understand how to respond in a disaster, the process, what resources are available, how fast they're available, and what they will have to do on their own while they're waiting, is important.
Watching some of the videos in North Carolina, there are dozens of volunteer organizations trying to help, and no coordination among them. We need to get better at this. Local emergency management officials should lean forward and ask for lessons learned. Plan for how to establish communications networks between volunteer organizations. Let them know how to become part of those networks.
And what is the long-term recovery process? Who oversees that? Implied in this video is that people who were flooded may be eligible for FEMA grants to elevate their homes. How does that work? I'm certain it's a much slower process than the one speaker seems to think it is.
And Florida is just incredibly vulnerable. If you can leave, you probably should. I want to, but I'm only 49% of the vote. Otherwise, be ready to be just like these folks if you don't plan for becoming a victim of a natural disaster.
We have at least one advantage now, someplace to go if we get flooded out here. That's a privilege, for sure, and it has brought me at least some peace of mind. Yeah, it's not ideal in terms of managing things here. I was watching mail get delivered to flooded out, uninhabited homes on the gulf coast, because the Post Office can't just store it all, and the mail carriers feel bad about it. So we need to plan to get a mail forwarding request in as soon as the Post Office resumes operations.
Maybe everyone needs to have a mail forwarding record on file that gets activated in a disaster declaration?
We need to figure this out.
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