Undercover

09:02 Friday, 9 October 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 50.14°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 3.62mph
Words: 438

The roof decking is all on and they're finishing the membrane this morning. Patio pour has been moved to tomorrow. If the gable windows arrive today, they may try to install those.

Septic tank went in, passed inspection and is covered. Most of the earth-moving is done until Spring. We have one pile of what is, essentially, topsoil that is going over the berm, and a remaining pile of dirt and shale that will be used as fill. Ken's not going to have to haul anything away, but we will be bringing in topsoil to cover the fill.

Yesterday I went to Horseheads to a FedEx facility near the airport, only to learn that the customer-facing office had been permanently closed since June! If you want to drop stuff off, apparently they have a deal with Dollar General now. But the drive into Horseheads was beautiful.

I've got to see the folks who gave me my CPAP machine about a new mask. I asked for the same kind Mitzi uses, which she prefers. I can't stand it. It's the hose. I don't sleep in one position for very long, I toss and turn all night. That stupid hose gets wrapped around my neck and it pulls on me when I'm moving. How do people sleep with these things? I saw one where the hose goes over the top of your head. I think that'll keep it away from my neck and arms. We'll see.

Worked with the IIe some more yesterday. Disk 2 is a little slow, but it's reading floppies. I've got an Applesauce floppy disk controller inbound soon. This allows you to connect a Disk II to a Mac and make magnetic flux images of the disk. You can then convert those flux images into a disk image usable by an emulator or real hardware.

I had one back in 2018, and this is a new, more refined version. I'm hoping to preserve Micro Dynamo by Addison Wesley, which is a UCSD Pascal OS disk of a Fortran program that is a much reduced version of Dynamo, the modeling and simulation program used in the Limits to Growth effort.

It's a program that I've never seen online anywhere, and only saw once on eBay, and I bought it. It runs, but it's copy protected and I don't recall if I imaged it back then. But that's in storage as well, so all this has to wait for the house to be finished.

Playing with these computers has been fun, but it also points out how confining this little house is.

The beat goes on...