We're All Guilty

06:14 Thursday, 31 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.11°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 528

Irony is the fifth fundamental force of the universe, so I bought a new iPhone 16.

Not a "pro" version. There's only so much oblivious over-consumption I can handle. (Did I need a new phone? No. Do I need one at all? Well, not a "smart" phone.)

Anyway...

I had some time to kill in Alpharetta last Friday, and there was some big Avalon Mall (They're big on names beginning with "A" in Georgia.) with an Apple Store (at the Avalon Mall in Alpharetta, Georgia). Mitzi had the good sense to tell me to order it online for pickup at the mall and avoid the crowd. Worked like a charm.

"Dynamic Island" is a big yawn. The new camera button makes it harder to figure out by feel which way the phone is oriented in my hand. I suppose I'll get over that eventually. Feels like a gimmick.

One thing I forgot about is the switch to USB-C from Lightning means I can't use my IR camera on my phone. I still have an iPod, so I can use it on that. Likewise with an external mic I have but seldom use. (Never use? See "over-consumption," above.) And we have to have two different cords in the car, depending on who's using their phone for CarPlay. And the charging stand next to the bed is now irrelevant.

I bought the 256GB model. I checked my iPhone 13 and I had 5GB "free" on my 128GB model. I'll probably keep this phone until the iPhone 20 comes out. (If we're all still here and Apple is still making iPhones.)

It's almost head-spinning, the cognitive dissonance. We're hurtling headlong toward disaster, but still gotta put new tires on the RAV4. (Going with the Michelin CrossClimate II, because of course. If we ever do get out of Florida to New York, they're pretty good on snow.)

Why do they call it the "poly-crisis"? Why not "multi-crisis"? I think that's much more hip.

For whatever it's worth, I have no clue who Joe Rogen is. Clearly, I'm old and irrelevant. I read about him a lot, but never listened to his podcast and don't wish to do so.

Grocery stores are greedy. I've been buying Publix store-brand raisin bran for months. (Gotta feed your microbiome.) It was $2.46 when the name brands were like $6.00+! Well, yesterday I bought a box and it was $3.15! That's a 28% price increase, about 10x the rate of inflation.

I double-checked (maybe triple) with the Supervisor of Elections office, and my ballot is still showing as having been counted.

Can't be too careful these days.

We can't even look forward to having this thing resolved this Tuesday, unless Trump wins. If he loses, which we may not even know for some days, then it'll be a shit-storm of election denialism. If he wins, it'll just be a shit-storm.

Patti Griffin has a song called "Please Don't Let Me Die In Florida." Seems relevant.

Where's the "spaghetti model" for the oncoming shit-storm? What category is it? What surge can we expect?

God help us all.

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Is This Thing On?

06:12 Thursday, 31 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.11°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 17

Just a friendly reminder that we're not paying attention, and, as a result, we're all doomed.

Seriously.

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"Get me to the chopper"

16:45 Wednesday, 30 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 80.83°F Pressure: 1024hPa Humidity: 69% Wind: 17.27mph
Words: 26

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Certainly clearer than my description.

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Kevin Drum

16:35 Wednesday, 30 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.01°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 68% Wind: 17.27mph
Words: 79

I added Kevin Drum's blog to my feed-reader some time ago, and enjoy reading his take on things. He blogs often, usually several times a day. I think he's a centrist politically, probably leans right, but he's data-driven more than ideologically.

Here's an example of what I would say was a pretty clear-eyed take on current events.

I know how we got here. It's less clear, or certain, to me how we'll find our way back.

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This and That

15:43 Wednesday, 30 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 80.19°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 18.41mph
Words: 920

Today flew by!

Mitzi and I walked to the clubhouse this morning. We've signed up for a personal trainer, with the "buddy" discount. We each have to do an individual assessment ($50). Could've gotten that as part of the "buddy" discount, but didn't notice until after we'd already paid, and didn't want to go through the hassle of refunding the transaction and buying it again.

We each paid for 8 sessions, so at twice a week that should give us two months worth of individualized attention and hopefully enough motivation and insight to get on with it by ourselves afterward.

I asked my doctor if I was a candidate for Ozempic and she said no. Guess I gotta do it the old-fashioned way. But I'm going to try Noom.

Anyway, we plan to start after Thanksgiving. We're going up to New York to spend a couple of weeks in the Finger Lakes and spend Thanksgiving with my mom.

I need to strengthen my core so I can drag all my shit to the curb someday.

The trip was nice. If I could, I'd leave at 0200 every time. No traffic! Only thing you have to worry about are drunks and wild animals. The highway out of Blue Ridge was mostly empty, I think three cars passed us. Speed limit was 65 most of the time, but I had the RAV4 in cruise control at 60, figuring I could use a few extra milliseconds if a deer jumped in front of the car. If it weren't for the absence of what would otherwise have been some nice scenery, it was as pleasant as a drive can be these days!

Atlanta at night is pretty stunning too, though I had to keep my attention on the road. There was a pretty substantial amount of traffic on the road.

The RAV4 performed well. At night, it seems to notice the lane lines better and it pretty much steered itself. It does get confused at construction zones. We didn't encounter much construction, but areas where there would be construction once the sun came up, with all the orange barrels with reflectors, seemed to confuse the system a bit.

And in the two places where we did encounter construction, the lighting is confusing and distracting. You've got the barrels reflecting your headlights, police vehicles with blue lights flashing, the construction equipment with flashing lights, and the work lights illuminating the work area.

I felt as though it was almost blinding. I'm developing cataracts, so there are more internal reflections within the lenses of my eyes, so the lights tend to "bloom." I mostly tried to focus on the line at the left side of the lane to limit the amount of light I was admitting in my field of view. And forget about lane-keeping by the car. It would notice if I was drifting left (the car tends to go where your eyes go), and vibrate the wheel, so that was helpful.

But very few tractor-trailers, or any commercial traffic, so visibility was otherwise very good. I-75 is a better road than I-95. I was able to stay in cruise most of the time, with radar-assisted station-keeping. We weren't in a hurry, traffic was relatively light and moving at a fairly consistent pace. By the time we got to I-10 we were almost home and the worst nuisance was the rising sun! I'd left my sunglasses somewhere in the back seat where Mitzi couldn't find them from the front passenger's seat.

The wedding was lovely. The venue was remarkable, I think it's pretty much the thing they do the most. The bride and groom departed in a helicopter. I thought that was a bit over the top, but I guess the theme of their marriage is going to be "adventure." The helipad was a floating device that is kept submerged in a pond at the venue. At the appointed moment, it is raised by flotation using pneumatic pumps and the helicopter lands on it. It is then winched to the "dock" where there's a covered feature to send off the happy couple. It even has a little "spray" feature around the perimeter of the helipad that adds a little visual flair and additional "mist" when it lifts off.

The helicopter is a Robinson R44 helicopter. I didn't mention "mast bumping," or the safety record of that particular aircraft to the groom's parents. Apparently, the venue has been doing this for eight years and hasn't lost a couple yet!

The day after the wedding we headed up to Blue Ridge for some family stuff with Mitzi's siblings. Her mom passed away in January and there were some personal items to sort out and so on. We all went on a boat ride on the lake for a couple of hours, and you couldn't have asked for nicer weather.

Mitzi's brothers-in-law are both conservative Republicans, one is full-on MAGA, the other a little less so. We made an effort to avoid politics, although the less "extreme" of the two felt as though he had to share that he couldn't bring himself to vote for either presidential candidate.

I don't know if that's true, or if it's in any way indicative of some number of other Republicans. It's just an anecdote.

All-in-all, it was a very pleasant weekend, a nice change of scenery and good to spend some time with Mitzi's daughters and her siblings.

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Back Home

12:06 Tuesday, 29 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.42°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 16.11mph
Words: 324

Ten hours ago, at 0200, we were in Blue Ridge, Georgia. We couldn't sleep, and we were faced with the prospect of driving through Atlanta traffic in morning rush hour.

We got packed and got on the road at 0217.

Rolled through Atlanta at 0345, and I was still quite surprised by the amount of traffic.

Got to Tifton, Georgia at 0630, which is the home of Adcock Pecans. Since Mitzi had given away all the pecans she bought on the way up to her daughters and siblings, she wanted to stop on the way home. I didn't think they'd be open, didn't want to hang around until they did.

As luck would have it, they open at 0730. We stopped at the Waffle House across the street from Adcock and had breakfast. Went over to the store at 0720, and they were already open. Back on the road by 0730.

We made great time, though there were a few times when each of us got rather cross with the other. We've been home since 1030, unpacking and getting cleaned up. I'm in the recliner with the MBP, cleaning up the mess I made starting up the iMac before I'd closed this Tinderbox file on the MBP. TBX on the iMac opened the file to the version that closed when I shut down the iMac on the 24th.

I forced quit Tinderbox, which didn't help. I watched as this file, on the MBP, changed right before my eyes! I didn't expect that to happen. I expected to get some kind of conflict notification, but nope. It just made the open version turn into the one from the 24th of October, "losing" 8 posts.

Live.

Did the "Revert to" thing, which never goes smoothly, but after having to force quit Tinderbox again, after choosing the correct version, I was able to open Tinderbox and then get this version back.

Ugh.

Anyway, back up and running.

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Juro Spider

14:44 Saturday, 26 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 83.55°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 58% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 44

Brought along the OM-5 with the 14-150mm/f4-5.6 mounted. Most of my shots were of Juro spiders. They were nearly everywhere. Very active in their webs too.

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Alpharetta

14:39 Saturday, 26 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 83.55°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 58% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 76

The view from the hotel window this morning. Weather has been wonderful. Took a little walk along some greenway. Juro spiders everywhere!

Wedding in a couple of hours. Tomorrow dropping Mitzi's kids at the MARTA to get them to the airport, then we're off to her sister's place in Blue Ridge for another family event on Monday. Back on the road Tuesday.

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Extraordinary Times

08:55 Friday, 25 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 66.2°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 204

As I think I've mentioned before, one of the things that kind of keeps me from being swallowed by the abyss is Heather Cox Richardson's blog. It's not that she's telling me everything is going to be ok, but she is showing me historical precedents that may offer some hope.

Today's post isn't especially comforting, but it does point out the reckoning that is coming to the Republican Party.

I think.

And there is probably little that I would agree with Mitch McConnell about, but he's got Rick Scott's number. Rick Scott is a hollow man. A husk, desperately seeking to fill an aching void within by acquiring wealth and power. He was my big worry for 2024, a "Trump 2.0." Someone who could exploit all the racism and nationalism, but could do it in polite company. He's a cold, calculating son-of-a-bitch with as little empathy as Trump, but more intelligence.

It's unlikely Debbie Mucarsel-Powell will unseat him, though the race is closer than many seemingly expected. If the abortion and marijuauna amendments turn out enough voters not enamored with Scott, she may have a shot. I would welcome it as one welcomes the sunshine after a cold, dark winter.

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Transcendent

08:27 Friday, 25 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 65.43°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 73

Spotted this in my feed from Jason.

This is the kind of transcendent writing that I would aspire to, were I of a more generous heart.

Luminous.

You get these sort of "life lesson" posts from time to time, even from here.

Seldom as rich and beautiful as this one.

I'm not down on myself, I'm just humbled by the some of the company we keep around here.

Doin' the best I can.

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Speaking of Bloggers

08:18 Friday, 25 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 65.43°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 82

Dr. James Vornov has resumed an irregular schedule of posts at On Deciding... Better 3.0. He's in the midst of birthing a book, which likely commands a great deal of his attention.

For those just tuning in Dr. Vornov is a neurologist and biker who's been blogging since way back in the day. He was among the cohort introduced to the medium by Dave Winer's editthispage.com, including your's truly, and I've been reading him for, well, a very long time.

Recommended.

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Famous to 15 People

08:08 Friday, 25 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 65.77°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 175

Denny Henke is up at Manuel Morales' P&B (People and Blogs) series. I follow Denny's blog, beardystarstuff.net, but I confess, there must have been a change to his RSS feed, because I hadn't seen an update since September. So I hopped over to the actual page and clicked on the RSS button in Safari and got a new feed in NetNewsWire!

Anyway, I'm (mostly) caught up now! I should pay more attention to regular posters when they appear to go silent. Somewhat in my own defense, we had a busy September and October between closing on the place up north, moving stuff there and coming home to a couple of storm systems.

I'm blushing as I type this, because your genial host appears at the top of a list of current favorites. (Insert meme of Sally Field here. IYKYK).

Anyway, check out the post and if you don't follow Denny or Manuel, add them to your feed. Old-school blogging, the way it should be.

Now you damn kids get off my lawn!

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Archive Online

08:04 Friday, 25 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 66.2°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 21

Archive.org is back up. Downloading old issues of Creative Computing.

Hope it stays up now. Why attack the Internet Archive?

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Counted

07:15 Friday, 25 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 65.26°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 111

Checked the Supervisor of Elections website and my vote has been counted. That's a relief.

Truly, it was a bucket-list item. I can die now, knowing I've given my country my last full measure of my franchise.

Maybe a little dramatic? Yeah, but not much.

Anyway, I guess I'm glad to see more serious discussion of Trump being a fascist. On one hand, it's kind of incomprehensible. But on the other hand, there has always been a strong authoritarian appetite among some Americans. I guess we get to find out how many.

I guess we get to find out if America is a fascist country.

I know where I stand.

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Political Monoculture

06:43 Thursday, 24 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 62.35°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 0mph
Words: 70

Florida has been a Republican monoculture for more than a generation. There's never any accountability at the polls, because Republicans rigged the state, and they'll just put up another corrupt rubber-stamp if an incumbent gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

Anyway, here's a recent example.

Monocultures are more vulnerable to disease and parasites. Ideally, we should want diverse views in our legislatures. But not in Florida.

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Little Update

06:41 Thursday, 24 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 62.35°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 0mph
Words: 74

Mentioned Aaron Bean yesterday as one of the Florida representatives who votes against his constituents' interests, and who serves in a district hand-created for him by Governor Ron DeSantis to deny Black Floridians the opportunity to elect a representative of their choosing.

In Florida, politicians choose their voters.

Of course, if you're down with the whole Project 2025 thing, and are wealthy enough to afford insurance, then Florida might just be your paradise.

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Flat Florida Floods

06:39 Thursday, 24 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 62.35°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 0mph
Words: 62

77% of Citizens Insurance claims for Debby denied.

Because Florida floods.

If you're thinking of moving to Florida, think again.

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Happier News

17:44 Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 78.3°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 1207

I'm still working on Sierpinski. Ahl never identified his variables, some of which are readily identified, others are more obscure. At any rate SP (an integer nevertheless converted into its floating point representation in Applesoft), is pretty clearly "stack pointer," which is the index value in array ST (stack, obviously).

What aren't clear are TP and PS, which are changed in the push and pop stack subroutines. When TP=0, we draw three segments, when TP=1, we draw one. When SP is 1, TP is 1; when SP is 2, TP is 0. These seem to determine which of the four 3-part segments we're drawing, right, up, left or down, or the single, 1-part, connecting segments. I'm making progress.

As regards the RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB AT 190 error, I think I should incorporate a POP statement in the pop subroutine when SP and TP are both equal to zero, which seems intended to indicate the curve is closed. That the curve of that particular order is complete. I've never used POP before, so that'll be educational.

But, I'm not exactly sure about that, because I don't have a clear understanding of the flow of control; and so more study is necessary.

But it is becoming less murky.

In other news. as part of my effort to stay away from the news, I haunt a number of forums. I seldom have anything of value to offer, so I mostly just lurk. Sometimes I learn something. Sometimes it can be as frustrating as watching the news. That happens most often a DP Review where some people are needlessly, or obliviously, harsh in criticizing someone's photos. Especially if the OP is extolling the virtues of some lens. There's always someone who has to display their superior knowledge and experience, and do so in a way that seems intended to belittle the OP.

I tend to visit DP Review far less often than in years past, but I'm kind of grasping about for distractions these days.

But I also visit the HP calculator forums, and can be harmlessly distracted for a while. But, it's like cameras used to be for me. I'd read about someone else's gear, and decide I had to have one for myself. Which probably accounts for the ridiculous number of cameras I own.

Anyway, some clever people have reverse engineered the little software cartridges for the TI-95 and TI-74 BASICalc. This was exciting news, as I have two of each. I'm a sucker for modern mods to retro gear. In the course of the thread, I learned that later models of the TI-74 were able to address up to 32K of external (cartridge) RAM. TI sold an 8K RAM cartridge with a (non-replaceable) coin cell inside that could be used as a kind of RAM disk, or to expand the available RAM to the cpu from 8K to 16K.

Those coin cells have long since gone dead, and it wasn't always clear to me whether they would work as volatile RAM with a dead battery. It didn't seem to matter, because even after haunting ebay for months, I'd never seen one come up for sale. Even the program ROM cartridges seemed to command rather absurdly high prices. (All of us old farts with too much money and time on our hands keep driving up the prices, I guess.)

Well, the prospect that there might be a new RAM expansion cartridge coming for the TI-74, that would be larger than the 8K original, prompted me to look and see what was on the market. Both of my TI-74s have relatively low serial numbers, and likely would not be able to see more than 8K of additional RAM.

Anyway, as these things go, or luck would have it, there was a TI-74 with an 8K RAM expansion cartridge for sale! It wasn't an auction, and there was a "make offer" button, so I made an offer. It was listed for $65, which was itself, in my experience, a great price. But together with an 8K RAM cartridge, I could easily see it going for twice that price, or more.

Sometimes, you get lucky. Like I did with the seller who sold me an Apple IIc external disk drive, with a free Apple IIc computer included! And a damn good price for the disk drive. Too bad they didn't pack it better. I'm still looking for a replacement space bar.

Anyway, I offered $59 for it and the offer was immediately accepted. It arrived this afternoon.

Cosmetically, it's in great condition. LCD screen isn't showing signs of degradation. Serial number is astronomical, 9-million something. But the date of manufacture is 7/87, which is only a year later than the 1986 year of manufacture of my other two. (One is 00847, the other is 10k-something. That one has a rotting LCD.)

Batteries were installed, but not leaking. Powered on fine. I have the manuals, so I had to look up how to check to see how much memory was available. It's a ROM routine you have to CALL to turn the cartridge into RAM available to the cpu. CALL ADDMEM, makes the RAM available and turns off the file storage function.

To see if it worked, I entered FRE(0), which reports the amount of RAM available. (FRE(1) would report the amount of RAM consumed by the program in memory.)

Well, success! FRE(0) reports 15902 bytes available. So it would appear that a dead battery doesn't preclude using the RAM for program memory. I'll have to fill a large array to verify it, but it seems reasonable to believe it'll work just fine.

Of course, what the hell need do I have for a nearly forty year old handheld BASIC computer with a single-line LCD display? None. Just something to play with, to pass the time. To recall what "the future" once looked like.

I have a printer for the TI-74, and it can power the computer while you're changing batteries. (I think. It's been a while since I've played with it.) So the idea would be to write a little menu-driven program with a number of little sub-programs to call from the menu. 16K is quite a bit of memory for a little computer. Really, its biggest limitation is the display, but it's intended to be portable.

And I just recalled that I bought a little arduino device someone made that's supposed to allow the 74 to interface with a cassette tape drive. I was planning on trying to use the recorder feature in my iPod.

And someone else on the HP forum is building new HP-IL interface boxes (PIL-boxes), and those are supposed to be available sometime soon. I have a couple of HP-75s and an HP-71b with the HP-IL interface, and the HP-IL video interface.

I don't know what my kids are going to do with all this crap when I die. I'm sure it'd be a pain in the ass to sell it, but they'd probably get a fair amount of money for their trouble. I'll be past worrying about it though.

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A Favor...

12:26 Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 77.47°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 37

If you're getting a "sign in to prove you're not a bot," on these embedded YouTube videos, please let me know. There's no point in embedding them if you have to jump through hoops to watch them.

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Low Probability/High Impact

12:16 Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 77.45°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 78% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 167

When you have an individual disaster, your house catches fire, or a pipe ruptures, it's just you, your insurance company and the county.

When you have a major disaster declaration, and thousands of people are going to be needing federal dollars, in a situation that is simply asking for fraud, there are going to be a lot of rules and regulations to prevent fraud. And everything gets harder. Slower. More bureaucratic.

Ultimately, the assistance is there. You get some relief. But it's not going to be quick, or easy, and you're going to have to take your place in line.

Unless you're an entitled prick like this guy. And Florida is filled with entitled pricks.

If you're thinking of moving to Florida, change your mind.

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Hanging On

09:28 Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.82°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 433

It's this kind of stuff that I shouldn't read, because I swear to God I'm going to have a fucking stroke!

When I spoke to Farah, who is now known as Alyssa Farah Griffin, this week, she said, “I understood that people were skeptical about the ‘suckers and losers’ story, and I was in the White House pushing back against it. But he said this to John Kelly’s face, and I fundamentally, absolutely believe that John Kelly is an honorable man who served our country and who loves and respects our troops. I’ve heard Donald Trump speak in a dehumanizing way about so many groups. After working for him in 2020 and hearing his continuous attacks on service members since that time, including my former boss General Mark Milley, I firmly and unequivocally believe General Kelly’s account.”

I struggle with the idea that people were once loyal to Trump and supported him and now speak out against him. I mean, what the actual fuck? On one hand, I'm glad they're, I don't know, seeking redemption, or forgiveness, or the ability to sleep at night.

But on the other hand... What the actual fuck?

Why did you work for him to begin with? Are you blind? Stupid? Or just figured it'd work out for you somehow? Needed the paycheck?

I see that dipshit Michael Waltz, the congressman from the district just south of here on TV (via YouTube). He's a sell-out. He was among those brave souls who "stormed the SCIF," during the Trump impeachment investigation. He's a performative asshole. A moral coward. But he gets a lot of air time because is a Green Beret colonel in the reserves. He's a chump. A disgrace to the uniform. A "Florida man."

My own congressman, John Rutherford, is a liar and a moral coward, but he's been keeping a relatively low profile on Trump and hasn't been actively voting against the interests of his constituents. Lately, anyway. (Bearded Aaron Bean is also on that list. Freshman from the district north of Rutherford's. DeSantis drew a special district for him, eliminating a district drawn to allow Black Floridians a chance to elect a representative of their choice. This fucking state.)

I think of the faces of the voters I saw going into the library yesterday morning. They looked grim. I don't know why, but it didn't look good. I live in the highest median-income county in Florida. These were people with money. Education.

I'm convinced they're voting for Trump. They're just unhappy that they can't be openly proud of it.

I hope I'm wrong.

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The Definition of Insanity

07:14 Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.28°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 5.99mph
Words: 16

If you look up "insanity" in the dictionary, there ought to be a picture of Florida.

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Slept

06:42 Wednesday, 23 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.06°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 570

Better. Not "great," but good enough.

I get up in the morning and watch the monologues from Colbert and Seth Myers. I need a laugh first thing in the morning. I look a little bit at Apple News+, mostly I do the Quartiles game.

But I can't stand to look at election news. There was one good story about the Georgia state supreme court letting stand a lower court ruling that puts those new election rules on hold, at least through this cycle. That was one potential source of chaos. But the rest of the headlines were all about how "close" this election is. Then I just move on.

I don't know if it's me, or if the media is trying to drive clicks, but they seem more hysterical by the minute. What are we supposed to do with this information? Well, click on it, obviously. But I've already voted. I don't run Kamala's campaign. I can't do outreach to America's millions of young men who seem delusional.

What's the point?

I watch a lot of local Florida news in YouTube. Anecdotes (news stories) aren't "data," but it does feel as though a "get the hell out of Dodge" theme is beginning to emerge. It may be an illusion. People love Florida winters and no state income tax. This state won't be depopulating soon. But smart people will leave. I think I'm making progress with Mitzi.

Our situation is like the last 50 years of the climate crisis in a microcosm. There's the growing awareness that we might be vulnerable to something catastrophic, but the reluctance to do anything about it. It's a "low probability, high impact" risk. My assessment is that, while it may well be the case that our particular part of Florida won't see a hurricane with significant storm surge in our lifetime, if we do, I don't want to have to be trying to cope with the aftermath.

As I've told many of my friends, I don't want to be in my 70s, dragging all my shit to the curb and dealing with all the paperwork to try and "recover." If I'm lucky, I've got maybe 10 or 15 years of decent quality of life left. I don't want to spend two of them grappling with this bullshit.

There are folks in Tampa who just gutted their places to the studs and are putting them on the market, hoping institutional investors will buy them and rent them to folks who will eventually have to carry all their crap to the curb.

It's insanity.

Anyway, Mitzi's talking more about it, so I know it's in her mind. I don't push. I don't think I'll be out of here by next hurricane season, but maybe 2026. Hope so anyway. I'll be 70 in 2027.

I know New York isn't paradise. It'll be gray much of the year. But it's safer, at least in terms of large-scale catastrophes. We're always at risk of individual catastrophic events, no matter where you live. But it's unlikely we'll see an event where thousands of people around us are all competing for resources to recover, adding to the doubt and uncertainty and stress.

And I just don't like Florida anymore. I guess "hate" is too strong a word, but this is a cruel state. It does something to people. Something that isn't good.

And I just want to get out of here.

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Getting On With It

19:36 Tuesday, 22 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 72.07°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 350

We did poll greeting for early voting this morning. A lot of turnout, but since this is a very red county (almost 3 to 1), it was mostly Republicans. We were there from 0800 to 1030. There was a fairly good-sized line from about 1000. It seems Republicans have gotten over their distaste for early voting.

Didn't get as many dirty looks, and nobody gave us the finger, which was refreshing. If someone stopped by the Republican table and took a slate guide, I assumed they were Republicans. Some of them were energetic, enthusiastic, but most of them looked grim.

The Dem volunteer who set up our table said he was confident we were getting a lot of crossover votes. I'm not that confident at all. We'll know in a little more than two weeks after all the tallies have been analyzed.

The Dems who voted while we were there came by and thanked us for being there. More than one said, "You're braver than I am." There were no acts of voter intimidation that I observed.

Checked on my ballot this afternoon. Not reported received yet. Tomorrow I'll start to be concerned. Thursday, I'll be worried. But, plenty of time to take corrective action.

We watched Lee last night, a bio-pic about Lee Miller, former fashion model turned photographer, turned WWII war correspondent. Fascinating story. I'd only learned of her when I was doing so much reading about WW II the past couple of years; and that was mostly in the context of her iconic photo in Hitler's bathtub in his Munich apartment. Her story is remarkable, and she was a talented, complicated, damaged and powerful woman.

Kate Winslet was magnificent. Highly recommended.

We're off to Georgia on Thursday for a family wedding and other family business. Back here on Tuesday. Two family members are Trumpers, one with a frequent wish to engage in "debate." I will be biting my tongue.

Hoping I sleep tonight. I'd go to bed now, except I know I'd wake up around 0100 and who knows if I'd fall back to sleep.

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Round 'em Up

06:39 Tuesday, 22 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.89°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 89

It must be something in the air. Just catching up with the blogs I follow and stumbled on this.

Mass deportations require "informants," people ratting out their neighbors.

Well, they were never really their neighbors, were they?

"They're eating the cats!"

Trump voters.

People like you and me.

Really?

A nation of cowboys.

A nation of Staszi.

Read the post.

Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people unsafe.

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This Morning's Moon 10-22-24

06:32 Tuesday, 22 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 70.02°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 39

I forgot to mention "the enemy within."

"Round 'em up!"

Anyway.

Moon was directly overhead. Hardest elevation to shoot. Got two decent shots. Here's one.

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Sleepless

04:53 Tuesday, 22 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.98°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 316

I've been awake since 01:49. Wake up to piss, go back to bed and lie awake wondering why people want to vote for Donald Trump.

I don't know that I've come to any stunning insight, but it seems to me that these people are among those, from any time in history, who want to "Round 'em up!"

Immigration seems like the biggest issue for the Republican Party. An easy "other" to demonize.

"Round 'em up!"

Expel them from the country.

Germany in 1933? The Jews.

"Round 'em up!"

Originally they supposedly just wanted to expel them from Germany, but we know how that worked out.

America in 1941? The Japanese.

"Round 'em up!"

America in 1830? The Five Civilized Tribes.

"Round 'em up!"

America in the '50s? The communists.

"Round 'em up!"

(Probably couldn't "expel" them from the country so soon after WW II, but they did expel them from economic and cultural life.)

Fugitive slaves?

"Round 'em up!"

I definitely think this is, either consciously or unconsciously, the thing that most appeals to Trump voters. There are people who feel as though there are always some "others" who are getting something they don't deserve and the expense of the "good people." People who feel as though they might be better off if those "others" weren't "scamming the system."

This idea of "rough men," with guns and wearing uniforms "rounding 'em up," appeals to them. Excites them. Because it is "action," taken for them. "Protecting" them. Their "way of life."

Their pets.

I think they know this at some level. I think they're not proud of it. That's why the enthusiasm level is down. They're still going to vote for him, but they're not proud of it.

They want those "others" rounded up. Locked up. Roughed up.

Kicked out. To the curb.

To, "Make America Great Again."

America: A nation of cowboys.

"Round 'em up!"

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Briefly, Part the Second

06:23 Monday, 21 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 60.82°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 280

I decided I'm not going to eat breakfast ("The most important meal of the day.") before this appointment. There's no blood work that I know of, but whatever. I'd rather do this than cook and clean up.

I struggle with my anxiety about this election. I ask myself how my life will be different if Trump is (re)elected? Short of starting a thermonuclear exchange with China or Russia, it probably won't be. My problems will largely remain the same. So why should I be "freaking out?"

I guess I just don't like what it means. That there are enough people in this country that think a guy like Trump is acceptable as a leader. I mentioned that we don't have our street festooned with American flags this time, unlike in 2020. And the guy who had a Trump/Pence bumper sticker on his CRV for two years after Biden was elected, hasn't replaced it with a Trump/Vance one.

But that doesn't mean these folks aren't going to vote for him anyway. They may just not be proud of it this time. But they do like the cruelty. They like someone beating up on an "other." And they do think they'll do better economically, even though I think they're just fooling themselves. But it's the former point that troubles me the most.

They want a "strong man" leader. They figure if Trump loses his mind, they've got Vance, every bit as cruel as Trump.

I don't know what's going to happen, but if Trump wins again, it says so many things about America that I'd be ashamed of.

"Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world."

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Briefly

05:25 Monday, 21 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 60.82°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 88% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 721

I've been enjoying trying to understand this Sierpinski curve program. It's led to a number of interesting diversions. My efforts have been set back somewhat by the fact that the Internet Archive is still offline. I have a large number of computer magazines from the 70s and 80s already downloaded locally, but not that July 84 issue of Creative Computing. When my iMac started showing signs of instability (Finder wouldn't run, "relaunch" even.), I had to reboot to get everything back in order and those tabs with three issues of Creative Computing opened at archive.org became inert.

Anyway, I do have Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which was the original source of the algorithm that became the BASIC program that Ahl was converting. If you have the book, the discussion begins on page 134. I can't say I truly understand Wirth's Pascal implementation, at least not by inspection, but it's less opaque than the BASIC version.

So I've been adding PRINT statements to various subroutines, chiefly those controlling the stack. This has the effect of breaking up the TRACE output into digestible chunks, which are far more illuminating than anything else I've tried so far. The program draws one segment, then three segments, then one segment, and so on. Which subroutine is called depends on which way that portion of the curve has to go, right, left, up or down (whether you're adding or subtracting values to the preceding coordinate).

To be clear, the program works insofar as it draws the Sierpinski curve for orders 1 through 5 (the limit of the Apple II's hi-res screen). But the first order curve is drawn twice, for reasons I don't understand, and the program always ends with a RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR AT 190. And it hasn't, until yesterday, been clear to me exactly what was going on in terms of the flow. It's basically (Hah.) a list of subroutines that call each other recursively.

One brief diversion was to try and answer definitively whether Applesoft could do recursion. The answer is yes, it can. But I was put off briefly by Lon Poole's assertion on page 136 of the second edition of his Apple II User's Guide,

While it is perfectly acceptable and even desirable for one subroutine to call another, a subroutine cannot call itself. Neither can a subroutine call another subroutine that in turn calls the first subroutine. This is called recursion and is not allowed in BASIC on the Apple II.

To be fair to Poole, I suspect that this was text that was left over from the first edition, which may have only covered Woz's Integer BASIC, which may not have allowed recursion. Applesoft does.

The test that kind of satisfied my uncertainty was in a cool little book, Illustrating BASIC (A Simple Programming Language) by David Alcock. He writes about BASIC in general and some versions don't permit recursion. To find out if one does, on page 55 he offers a little routine to find the highest common factor of two numbers, which calls itself. I entered it, and played around with it for a while, entering successively higher numbers. I didn't get to a point where it error'ed out, but I believe the stack depth for GOSUB is 25 in Applesoft and I probably didn't enter a large enough second number to exceed that limit before I was satisfied Applesoft does indeed allow recursion.

Of course, the fact that the Sierpinski curve program worked should have resolved that question from the beginning, but I had a little nagging doubt (plus all these books on my shelf). Interestingly, the Applesoft BASIC Programmer's Reference Manual, volume 1 (for //e only), doesn't mention recursion at all, nor does it explicitly address a subroutine calling itself. It does mention that you can nest GOSUB calls up to 25 levels deep, as mentioned above. Exceeding that results in an OUT OF MEMORY error, which really means "out of stack space."

I think I need a POP statement when the last curve is completed to get rid of that final RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB AT 190 error.

Anyway, I've got a doctor's appointment this morning, so further investigation will have to wait. It's more like a "wellness check" than a physical or anything. I never look forward to these things.

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Ballot Cast

17:18 Friday, 18 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 67.66°F Pressure: 1025hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 31

Got my mail-in ballot this afternoon. I've completed it and put it in the outgoing mail. Now to watch to ensure it's been counted.

Then I can say I've voted.

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Bike Update

12:38 Friday, 18 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.11°F Pressure: 1027hPa Humidity: 70% Wind: 20.71mph
Words: 489

Rode to Publix this morning to pick up a few things. Didn't record the ride as a "workout," so I don't have a lot of specific data; but the watch records the activity anyway, including my heart rate. It's a windy day today, enough so that I wouldn't have ordinarily taken the bike. But the motor essentially negates the wind as a factor. (One minor exception, riding into the wind creates enough breeze that if my mouth is open, because I'm grinning like a fool, my tooth hurts.)

On the way there, I stayed in level 2 assist. When I went out biking with Mitzi last weekend, I stayed in level 1 and it was comfortable in 3rd gear without overtaking Mitzi or leaving her behind. With the wind today, I needed level 2 to keep up a decent speed. And by "decent" I mean 15mph, which is 25% faster than I could ride without the motor!

So the ride to the store was basically effortless.

Riding home, with the groceries on the front rack, I bumped up the assist level to 3 to quickly get up speed. I probably could have just started out in first gear and accomplished much the same thing. In a lower gear, the pedal would have been turning faster and the assist would have kicked in sooner. It's just that transition from standing at a light to rolling with a large load on the front tire that gets kind of wobbly. Without the motor, I'd always be in 1st gear starting out.

Along the way, I noticed a rider across the street from me, apparently also on an ebike, because I wasn't really gaining on them. So I felt a little competitive and bumped the assist level up to 4 (out of 5). On the way home, the wind was at my back, so I quickly got up to 19mph where the motor essentially cuts out. I did overtake my unwitting competitor, who seemed to take notice and accelerated, closing the distance between us. But I was at my turn for home, so the "race" was effectively over.

I stayed in level 4 and pedaled hard. I was riding in the road on the bike path and the faster you go, the less the relative speed between you and the jerks in cars who won't move over at all. ("People are great. Drivers are assholes.") In this instance, it was a guy in a super-duty truck with a diesel and some kind of resonator exhaust, pulling a Bobcat front-loader on a trailer, who seemed to feel as though he had to make some sort of statement by passing me as near to my lane as he could, while accelerating as hard (and as loud) as he could.

That's probably where my heart rate reached 164, according to my watch. Definitely got a workout.

I hate Florida.

But I love my bike.

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Super Moon

05:40 Thursday, 17 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 54.07°F Pressure: 1021hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 54

Technically, it's a couple of hours from being officially "super," but close enough.

Photographically, the full moon (100% illuminated) is less interesting. No shadows to generate relief. This is contrast enhanced, but little detail.

Sure was bright up there though.

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Debugging

15:18 Wednesday, 16 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.67°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 43% Wind: 20.71mph
Words: 314

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a "coder." I stumble through this stuff as best I can. Sometimes I can grasp it clearly, other times it's utterly opaque. But, I'm retired and what I lack in keen analytical insight I make up in an abundance of free time.

I'm trying to understand Sierpinski and the "RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR IN 190" thing.

I did something Ahl did in the article, and modified the program so it only drew the first order of the curve, and I did it with the TRACE command enabled, outputting it to the virtual printer. This records each line number as it's executed until the program halts. Because you can have multiple commands within a line number (separated by a colon), it'll repeat each line number for every command it contains.

Well, I got a lot of commands for just one curve, so I counted the number of times the plotting subroutine was called. There are 16 segments in the first order curve, but the plotting routine was called 32 times. It was doing it twice.

That seemed like a clue.

Because I modified the program to only draw the first order curve (DI=0), I didn't need the FOR...NEXT loop, so I just deleted the NEXT line, which also meant I didn't need the GOSUB 100 that was nested in that loop. Removing all that, it runs once and halts with the usual RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR.

What this suggests to me, kind of apart from the GOSUB and RETURN stuff, is that this "stack" construct is double counting somehow.

That's the next thing to investigate, how often the "PUSH" and "POP" routines are called and where.

While I do have an abundance of spare time, my interest and enthusiasm flags a bit, so I'm putting it aside for now.

But the beat goes on...

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Not So Fast

09:54 Wednesday, 16 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 60.62°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 61% Wind: 16.11mph
Words: 633

I received the 65c02 and ROMXe yesterday, so this morning I installed them.

I started out replacing the cpu. I removed the SpeedDemon, but left the Disk II controller in Slot 7. The Yellowstone card was already out of the computer. Didn't have too much trouble removing the cpu. There were some troubling sounds as 40 years worth of stiction was overcome, but it came out nicely with no bent pins. Socket looked clean, so I didn't do any Deoxit or anything.

Booted the machine to make sure the cpu worked before I did anything with the ROMs. Came up normally, so I went ahead with replacing the ROMs.

Similarly, the two 8K ROM chips came out without any trouble. The video ROM was harder because it's near the keyboard and I hadn't removed the case, so there was no place to really get much leverage with the front part of the chip. Bent a couple of pins getting it out, but they didn't break and straightened out easily.

I have two USB-powered LED desk lamps on the work bench, so I had good light as I aligned the pins with the sockets. The ROMxe is a circuit board, so it obscures much of the socket as you're getting it aligned. Patience and a good "feel" are helpful, and everything went in with no difficulty.

Next step was to boot the machine and see if it worked. Booted right into the configuration screen for the ROMx. The manual calls for launching Choplifter as a verification test. Launched fine and I had a joystick connected. Hard to play on a monochrome screen though. Saved a couple of hostages and powered down to install the SpeedDemon to see if that was compatible.

I was worried because both the ROMXe and the SpeedDemon kind of take control at boot-up to give you an opportunity to either disable the accelerator, or choose a different ROM image. I didn't know if there'd be some kind of contention conflict.

Worked just fine. The SpeedDemon grabbed control first, then the ROMXe. There's a countdown timer for the ROMXe configuration menu, which you can stop by pressing Escape; if you don't it goes through a normal boot sequence. But since the accelerator was active, the countdown timer went by in a flash. Then the computer booted normally from a floppy.

I removed the SpeedDemon and installed the Yellowstone card with the Floppy Emu attached to verify it worked with the new cpu and ROMs (didn't anticipate any problems, but best to check). Worked fine. I didn't put the Yellowstone in a higher numbered slot to see if it would automatically boot, but I'm confident that it would now with the enhanced ROMs on the motherboard.

Now was the moment of truth. Would having essentially an "enhanced" //e, albeit in a Rev A motherboard, allow the Yellowstone card to get along with the SpeedDemon?

Nope.

Same effect. Computer tries to boot from Slot 7, as intended, ProDOS splash screen appears and then we crash into the monitor.

At some other time, I'll use the monitor to examine where in memory the crash occurs and see if that offers any clues. For now, I've removed the Yellowstone card from the IIe. For the kind of recreational "programming" I'm doing, it's more fun to watch programs run fast. And since I do most of that programming sitting in the recliner on the IIc, I can just save it to floppy and take it into the garage to see how it performs at 3x speed. It's more important to have that 32MB HD capacity there, where I can swap around tools quickly, switching quickly from Program Writer to Beagle Compiler and back.

Cloudy and breezy this morning. Time to go take a walk.

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NY Times Podcast

06:55 Wednesday, 16 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 63.21°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 55% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 206

I guess these are going behind a paywall soon. No great loss, this is only the second one I've ever listened to and I've written off the NY Times as a legitimate source of news and information that serves the public interest. It's just a media outlet that serves its own interests.

Anyway, here's a brief podcast, about six minutes, from Florida resident and novelist Jeff VanderMeer, briefly recapping how we got here, and why he thinks "Florida is worth saving."

Florida is the third most populous state in the union. It's going to take a long time to depopulate it. So, whether it's "worth" saving or not, it's going to need a lot of federal help in the decades to come.

Florida is a slowly unfolding catastrophe, and I don't think the country has the resources to do anything other than "manage" it. It's never going to be a paradise. Parts of it will fare better than others, chiefly those with wealth.

It's already two states, one inhabited by the privileged and served by its permanently entrenched Republican government; and the other is inhabited by the ignored, the marginalized, disenfranchised and deliberately "othered."

It didn't have to be this way, but greed made it so.

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Flat, Flat, Flat

05:37 Wednesday, 16 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 65.08°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 57% Wind: 19.57mph
Words: 102

I'm not going to suggest that sea level rise is the proximate cause of this particular flooding, but sea level rise is a game of inches. When there is no place for the water to go, it just sits around. Watch as the county engineer issues a statement that there is no place to pump the water to. It's pretty telling.

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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.

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Ludicrous 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.

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Well...

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.

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Play 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.

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Let'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.)

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Another 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.

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Prepper

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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Kinda Working

15:10 Monday, 14 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 86.9°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 54% Wind: 5.99mph
Words: 300

Made some progress today. I had left out a line, which didn't seem to matter for single curves. I could get multiple curves plotted, but the 2nd and 3rd and 4th order curves weren't aligning correctly with the first order. The fourth order curve was only about two thirds the size of the preceding three plots. It'll plot up to the 5th order, but it gets so busy, you have to plot it by itself. And that takes two and a half minutes.

Since the Apple II hi-res screen coordinates go from 0 to 191 in the y-axis, division by 4 was going to give me a decimal value that would be ignored. I made the quotient an integer value, but I forgot to round up.

H=INT((H0/4)+.5)

Once I did that, everything aligned properly.

I still have a "RETURN WITHOUT GOSUB ERROR," but I'm taking a break.

I turned on the virtual printer and added a TRACE command and got three pages of line numbers being executed. (16 #s per line of print, 66 lines per page!) I tried following the "push" and "pop" on the stack array, but it started to make me go cross-eyed. Anyway, it's working. I may do some debugging later.

Do I understand the recursion? Not really, but I'll play with it some more. There are some other curves I want to try.

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Florida is FLAT

09:35 Monday, 14 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.75°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 117

Here's another unique feature of Florida that makes intense rainfall events more destructive: It's flat.

You don't get the kind of extreme, swift-water flash flooding that happens in mountainous regions where water rushes downhill. Instead, it slowly drains through the watershed. If the soils are saturated, it very slowly drains, eventually reaching the rivers and streams, which rise as they, themselves, move slowly, ultimately making their way to the sea.

Florida. A flooding paradise.

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Governor Dumbass

08:26 Monday, 14 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 63.03°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 199

Ron DeSantis is an ambitious man. He's not unintelligent, but his ambition has made him a fool and he does a disservice not only to himself and his reputation, but to all the people of Florida he supposedly "serves."

Discounting the role of climate change in Florida's repetitive extreme weather disasters, DeSantis recently said:

“I just think people should put this in perspective,” DeSantis said at Thursday’s news conference. “They try to take different things that happen with tropical weather and act like it’s something — there’s nothing new under the sun.”

He's a fool. There is something new under the sun. THIS CLIMATE.

This climate, the one we inhabit today, has never existed before in the history of this planet. This amount of atmospheric CO2, with these polar caps, with this landscape has never existed before in this history of this planet.

Should I repeat that again?

Yes, there have been hurricanes before.

But there have never before been hurricanes that formed in these climatic conditions.

Because this climate has never existed before in the history of this planet.

I wish people could get this through their thick skulls.

Especially intelligent people who should be able to understand this.

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Blindness

08:12 Monday, 14 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 62.56°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 89% Wind: 0mph
Words: 261

I'm glad that this type of coverage is becoming, at least temporarily, more prevalent. All of this was foreseeable. But developers and the counties that benefit from the property taxes only saw the money, not the risk. We're over-developed, and it's probably uninsurable at this point.

Our premiums are still affordable, for us. We're nowhere near that $11K "average." If it ever does get that high, I think Mitzi would be more amenable to leaving. I don't know what's going to happen, but we're going to find out over the next 12 months, as insurance companies pull out of the market, go under, raise premiums and fight the state and policy-holders. This is a slow-moving catastrophe.

One thing the report doesn't mention is that many people can't afford to leave. They're tied to jobs, mortgages, and schools. They won't be able to sell their homes because they'll be uninsurable, so that keeps them stuck here.

This is a "cascading climate catastrophe," which I used to tweet about often when I was on Twitter. Where one domino tips over hundreds more.

What's going to happen to the housing market in Florida when mortgage companies won't lend because insurance is unavailable or unaffordable? What happens to home prices? What happens to that "wealth"?

It was all utterly predictable.

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Last Night's Moon 10-13-24

05:53 Monday, 14 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 62.74°F Pressure: 1017hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 0mph
Words: 839

Hadn't done one of these in a while. Went out to look for the comet, but suspect my horizon is too cluttered, or sky is too bright. But it was clear and there was the moon.

Switched over from fidget spinner to doing some hi-res graphics stuff in Virtual ][, at least until I can figure out what's going on, then I'll play with it on the IIc. I need to look at an old issue of Creative Computing magazine, which is easier to do here at the iMac.

It's from the July 1984 issue, The Sierpinski Curve: A Lesson in Debugging and Conversion, by David H. Ahl. I'd link to it, but Archive.org is still offline after being hacked. If you google Sierpinski, you get a lot of stuff about the triangle, not so much about the curve. The article includes a nice capsule summary of the curve. Wikipedia does too.

In the article, Ahl is trying to convert a version of a program written in BASIC for the NEC 8801 computer, a Japanese computer, to some other variant of BASIC. Ahl wasn't very clear on which version of BASIC he was converting from and to, but both seemed ultimately to be some variant of Microsoft BASIC, which Applesoft is as well.

Apart from just being kind of interesting to watch as it is drawn onto the screen (which takes ~2m40s for the 5th order curve, at stock Apple II speed), it also deals with the concept of recursion. I have some notional understanding of the concept, but since I seldom do any real programming, as a practical technique, it remains kind of opaque to me. From the article:

This program, incidentally, takes advantage of the feature in MSX Basic and MBasic that permits a subroutine to call itself. This is known as recursion. It is often said that languages such as Basic and Fortran do not permit recursion. This is simply not true. While not all versions of Basic permit a subroutine to call itself, there are other ways of achieving recursion, but that is a subject for another day.

There are several subroutines in this program that call themselves.

The program that Ahl was converting would overlay curves of different orders, so you could have the 2nd order curve appear over the 1st order curve. It makes for a somewhat more interesting display. So far, my version works in drawing a single curve of orders 1 through 5, but it gets buggy when it begins to overlay two curves, so that's what I'm trying to figure out.

Ahl implemented a stack array to keep track of, well, something. I was confused because he didn't dimension (BASIC "DIM" statement) the stack array first. Looking at the Applesoft Reference Manual, apparently Microsoft let you get away with this and it assigns memory for 11 subscripts (elements 0 to 10) automatically. I'm not getting a BAD SUBSCRIPT ERROR, so I don't think that's the problem.

Anyway, it's something to distract me from the election. I cannot fathom how this thing can supposedly be this close. On the one hand, I'm somewhat encouraged by Harris's consistent, albeit slim, lead. I'm also encouraged by the evident lack of enthusiasm for Trump exhibited by my neighbors.

Four years ago, my street, and many if not most of the streets in this development, were positively festooned with American flags. This was code for Trump supporters, since the HOA doesn't permit partisan flags of any kind. Nothing like that today.

We were also having regular weekly "Trump flotillas" and boat parades. None of that has happened. Yet.

I don't see a lot of golf carts or pickup trucks driving around flying enormous Trump flags.

I'm rather certain that most of those folks will vote for Trump again; but they're not proud of it anymore. They don't want to own it.

Which is of absolutely no comfort.

"Plausible deniability."

It's almost more chilling.

And it's not just "rural Americans" who support this monster. These are wealthy suburbanites who embrace this fascist.

I'm eager to cast my mail-in ballot, so I can go online and verify that it has been counted. Then, if I have a stroke between now and election day, at least I'll have done what little I can to stop this catastrophe.

In the mean time, I'm going to distract myself by playing with old computers.

I need to order a 16-pin ribbon cable to plug into the Apple IIe in the garage. I want to bring those signals out to a breadboard to play with. This program is nothing but subroutines. Maybe add a line in four of the subroutines to ping one of the four annunciators available at that connector to light a different colored LED for each subroutine and see which one is lit most?

Well, mostly just because blinky lights are cool.

Something to look at...

Instead of staring into the abyss.

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Better

06:12 Sunday, 13 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 65.26°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 853

Rather than continuing to harp on the ongoing, unstoppable, slow-motion train wreck that is Florida, I thought I'd write about my return to the Naval Academy for the first time in 45 years.

It was the 45th reunion of the class of '79, and I'd never previously attended any of them. My experience at Annapolis was, shall we say, complicated. To make a long story short, I went there full of hope for success and achievement, quickly settled for "survival."

When I went to the academy, the model was "attritional." I'd never heard it expressed that way before, until I attended the Superintendent's brief to the class. But, yeah, it was definitely "attritional." Much like the Navy's "up or out" career path.

Well, they have a new model today. I don't recall specifically what she called it, but it's more like "recruit and retain." About 10% of the people who apply to Annapolis are admitted. I was surprised it was that much, but I guess that after almost a generation of a "Global War on Terror," a military career isn't as appealing as it once was. Vietnam wasn't that long, though it was far bloodier.

Anyway, the idea is to select the best candidates, and then help them succeed. That seems like a much smarter approach than the one I endured.

Not all of my classmates were as impressed. "Coddled" was a word that was mentioned.

But it's not "coddling" someone to help them succeed. Midshipmen must still accommodate themselves to military discipline, the physical demands, and the academic ones. Some can do this more readily than others. It's not that those "others" are unsuited for service in the military, it's just that they may need a little help getting started.

It was a pleasant surprise to learn how much affection I still have for my company-mates. The campus was almost unrecognizable to me, it's changed so much over the decades. Bancroft Hall, "Mother B," remained much as I remembered her, and the chapel. I wasn't much of a church-goer at the Academy. Plebe Summer I went every Sunday, because it got me out of Bancroft Hall, where danger lurked around every "squared corner." Once academic year came around, Sunday was a day to sleep in.

Whatever success I enjoyed in my Navy career was, in many respects, in spite of my experience at Annapolis, rather than because of it. But nearly all of the important lessons I've learned in my life, I learned in the navy, and that began at Annapolis.

That took nearly a lifetime, but it was worth it.

In case you're just tuning in, here's the short version:

Big picture? Life is meaningless.

If you're looking for meaning in your life, you're wasting your time. You won't find it. You must make it. We bring meaning to life.

The greatest opportunity to make meaning is through service to others.

Everything we have, all this stuff, all our awards, our titles our achievements can be taken from us in heartbeat. One day, life is pretty sweet. The next day, you're dragging all your stuff to the curb and looking for a new place to live. See: Current events.

The past is out of reach, the future is unknown. All we have are moments to live. One at time.

All we have are moments to live, and each other. Because we're all in this together, and none of us is getting out of here alive.

Power? It's an illusion. The only power that exists is the power to choose. It's a very weak power. Gravity is the weakest of the four fundamental forces of the universe. (Five, if you count irony. As I do.) Yet it holds the world together.

Our cognitive abilities? Our capacity for rational thought? We flatter ourselves. They're far more limited than we suppose. Most of what we do is habituated, unconscious. Stimulus and response.

The space where power exists is between stimulus and response, where you can choose.

That faculty that affords that space is attention. It's a resource, like time. And just as finite. Use it wisely. Pay attention to your what you're giving your attention to. Don't waste it. (Though we mostly do. But small investments yield huge dividends.)

The "ties that bind?" Faith.

Love.

Love is faith in action. Honor is the act of "keeping faith." Honor is love in action.

"Love your neighbor," is an act of service. It makes meaning. Makes your life "full" and not "empty." (Rick Scott, like most politicians, doesn't know this.)

Desire is the source of all suffering. It's glib and unfair, but suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be. Life is unfair. Arbitrary. Capricious.

COVID, Helene, and the shit we do to each other. It's all unfair. But it is what it is. The tautological tension that is "the harmony of binding opposites." Faith and fear. Love and anger. Honor and hate.

Yin and yang.

Existence and nothingness.

We live on the razor's edge.

Hold on.

To each other.

We're all we've got.

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Beat the Rush

05:54 Saturday, 12 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 62.89°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 56

Lots of stories about people who've endured Helene and Milton and saying, "Enough."

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Disaster Pr0n

06:30 Friday, 11 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.98°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 11.5mph
Words: 242

I confess to watching too many videos of the disaster in North Carolina. I didn't spend any time looking for those in Florida.

My correspondent yesterday asked, "And how about all that sand burying houses down SW." I replied that I hadn't seen any videos and we don't have cable anymore.

But this morning my YouTube page is filled with Florida disaster videos, and this one showed sand in houses. (Sand in houses is at the 3:00 min mark.) "Storm Chaser Aaron Rigsby" and his trusty drone. Keeping the world informed.

Or something.

Maybe we should mandate that all homes in Florida be essentially grass huts. That way, when they're washed away, there isn't so much unnatural debris that has to be carted to a landfill somewhere. It's not like we've got an abundance of land we can use to dump our disaster shit on.

And rebuilding shouldn't take as long. I guess we'd still need sewers though.

What happens to all those boats? Are they all repaired? Do they just wind up in a landfill?

Beats me. "Out of sight, out of mind," as they say.

Maybe Storm Chaser Aaron could expand his franchise to include Disaster Debris Chaser. Get a close look at the Florida landscape that has to receive all the sad consequences of our folly and hubris. I'm sure it'd make for compelling viewing. Maybe we could find a big enough sinkhole to drown it all in.

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It Can Happen Here

06:01 Friday, 11 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 69.82°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 189

It was just over 60 years ago. There are a few people alive today who recall Dora. But this area has grown immensely since 1964.

Florida has been filling from the bottom to the top, and it's damn near full now.

Most of those folks have never experienced a hurricane of any kind.

There are people here who believe that we can't get hit by a hurricane.

We can. And if we stay here long enough, we will.

And then we can share the experience so many Floridians have had. Evacuating. Sitting in traffic for hours. Waiting. Then returning home and dragging all of our water-soaked possessions to the curb, to be taken away to some landfill somewhere. Waiting on adjusters. Meeting with FEMA reps. Filing claims with our insurance companies. Picking up the pieces. Trying to find reliable contractors. Waiting for our turn to get rebuilt. Trying to find temporary accommodations. Maybe the HOA will allow FEMA trailers?

Yeah, probably not.

Then watching the tropics next year. If we're even back in our home.

But hey. Winter isn't bad and there's no state income tax.

Fuckin' paradise.

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Lessons Unlearned

21:10 Thursday, 10 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.98°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 8.99mph
Words: 188

A reader brought this to my attention from Craig Pittman, a Florida columnist. A review of what Florida learned back in 2004 when we were hit by four hurricanes in one season.

There's a lot of happy talk from the folks who are, perhaps justifiably, proud of their work. But I'm far less sanguine. Jeb mentions learning to prepare special needs shelters, but it was years later, under Rick Scott's watch that seniors died in assisted living facilities without backup generators and air conditioning. So I'm not really sure what Jeb's talking about.

Meanwhile, Florida has been a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party of Florida for the two decades since 2004, and I think their record speaks for itself. Unrestricted overdevelopment in vulnerable areas. No action on addressing climate change. A lot of lip service toward "resilience" as sea levels rise, hurricanes intensify and temperatures grow hotter.

I take it back. It's not "no action on addressing climate change." The legislature took action to remove any mention of it from Florida's statutes this year.

So, yeah, they've got their eye on the ball.

Florida is fucked.

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It's Not Just Me

21:06 Thursday, 10 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.98°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 8.99mph
Words: 76

Apple News+ link so apologies if you can't read it.

To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

A super-computer in everyone's pocket, networked to everyone else's.

What could go wrong?

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Beetlejuice x 2

20:38 Thursday, 10 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 74.17°F Pressure: 1014hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 17

Slow start, but builds to a fun climax. Loved it. Good movie for a rainy October day.

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In Happier News

10:46 Thursday, 10 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 70.68°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 16.11mph
Words: 422

I seem to be finally over the last of Covid. Apart from the tooth. (I can inhale through my teeth right now, and it's not screaming at me, but who knows? It might be better. It was actually worse yesterday.)

There's nothing going on in my sinuses and no upper respiratory congestion. My voice doesn't feel/sound hoarse. I slept well last night. At least, as well as I usually do.

I think Mitzi has a bit of cabin fever, sitting around here for the last few days, watching and waiting for Milton. So we're throwing caution to the wind this afternoon and going to a movie. The Beetlejuice sequel. Hopefully something mindless.

I've ordered my mail-in ballot. I want to get that turned in, just in case I stroke out before election day. Mitzi's already voted, and her vote has been counted. "Rumor has it," they're really scrutinizing the signatures. Jesus. I never sign my scrawl the same way twice. Should be fun.

Slow Horses wrapped last night. Some high spots, though I thought the overall storyline was a bit thin. I'm going to watch it all again because some of the plot points remain unclear to me. They've already made the next season. Sucks that we'll have to wait a year to see it.

There wasn't much of Oldman in this one, but for what there was, it was pretty good. Maybe I'm mis-remembering how much he'd figured in previous seasons. But I liked the way this one wrapped. He looks after "his Joes."

Bad Monkey wrapped as well. Vaughn was a bit too much with the "banter" in a couple of scenes, but mostly it was good. Pretty high body count, which surprised me. I don't know if they'll make another season, but I'd probably watch it.

It's been cloudy all morning, but the sun's beginning to peek through. Raining pretty much all the time. I want to get out and take a walk around. I don't expect to see anything in the way of "damage," but it would be nice to get out.

Spent some more time with Fidget Spinner. Found out that "Restore" in Applesoft always goes back to the first line of data in a program with any number of "data" statements. So you can't use multiple "data" statements to control the color sequence in a program with a number of different graphics routines, each designed with a different color sequence. Could use arrays instead. May try that later.

Anyway, the beat goes on...

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Worst Ideas Ever

10:29 Thursday, 10 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 70.95°F Pressure: 1006hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 19.57mph
Words: 239

Along with the automobile, I'm convinced that future historians, should we be so fortunate as to preserve a civilization that can afford the study of history, will regard "social media" as one of the worst ideas in humanity's history.

Technology changes how we do things, it doesn't change what we do. While it can empower people to do greater "good" things, it also empowers them to be stupid. It empowers bad actors to do more harm than they could otherwise. We don't have the faculties to manage this. We inhabit a culture and an economic system that seizes our attention and refuses to let it go. We can't think at all, let alone, "critically." We're too busy checking our "likes" and responding to outrage.

We have precious little in the way of rational cognitive capability. We're habituated creatures responding to emotional cues stimulated by economic and political entities competing for their own aims.

Faced with a climate crisis that demands rational action, we've diminished our capacity for rational thought to pad quarterly earnings statements and fight for political power.

Stick a fork in it. This civilization is done. It'll stumble along, getting progressively worse for a decade or so, then it's all just going to grind to a halt. "Influencers" will report on it through the lenses of their "augmented reality" glasses. "He who dies with the most clout wins."

It'd be funny if it wasn't so tragically stupid.

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This and That

10:13 Thursday, 10 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 71.11°F Pressure: 1006hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 19.57mph
Words: 337

Some serious weirdness this morning with Tinderbox. I exported Passed and Opening and then sync'ed with the server using Forklift, as per usual. I checked the web page and there was nothing on the home page.

Went back to Tinderbox to make sure the agent that creates the index page was working and all of the archives were gone! There was nothing in the Main Page agent container, and there were no children under Archives, which contains all the years going back to 2013!

That seemed really weird, so I closed the file without saving, or "discard changes," (whatever this bullshit paradigm is now). Reopened the marmot and the Archives came back, but without October! Christ! ("Last saved" was 23 September.)

Okay, time to screw with "Revert To."

Sure enough, there was this morning's post and all the rest of October on the right side of the screen, outlined in blue, which I guess means it's "selected." Clicked on "Restore" or "Revert" or whatever the action button is and expected to get the same nonsense I got last time I tried this, with dozens of windows of prior versions.

Nope, just the spinning pinwheel of infinite futility.

Went out to the kitchen to give the iMac some time to be alone with its thoughts. Came back several minutes later and still pinwheeling.

Sigh.

I force quit Tinderbox and relaunched it. Opened the marmot from "Open Recent," and everything was there. Except I knew it was from a "version" because the file name in the window lacked the ".tbx" file extension, which breaks the Photos AppleScript. So I added the file extension, and then saved a separate copy just in case more weirdness happened.

Anyway, things seem to be functioning normally now. For how long, I don't know.

The tech stack we operate with today is miles deep, and who knows what goes on in there? Nobody, that's who.

It's all opaque. You just have to hope it works.

It used to be, "It just works." Not anymore.

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Passed and Opening

05:22 Thursday, 10 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.63°F Pressure: 999hPa Humidity: 85% Wind: 23.02mph
Words: 227

Pressure bottomed out at 990.4 hPa at 0435, and is creeping up. Center of the storm is off the coast now. Lights are still on. My rain gauge is clogged, but a neighbor's is showing 2.5" in the last 24 hours, so it wasn't an enormous rain event, though the news says that parts of St Johns County had recorded 6" as of yesterday evening.

My wind gauge is useless, but it's very windy outside. Constant, you can hear it in the trees in the preserve. Saw nothing down in the limited view we have.

I think we're fine. My daughter is supposed to fly back to LA this morning, and they hadn't canceled her flight as of last night. Not sure how that's going to work.

A lot of time and warm water left in this hurricane season. Let's hope we've seen enough for this year.

I've mentioned before that Florida was one major hurricane away from an insurance crisis. Well, now we've had two.

This will be a slowly unfolding disaster, and the state government will be doing its best to obfuscate and deny. Gross incompetence and ineptitude, focusing on culture war issues, dividing people, ignoring the real threats facing Floridians.

But that's Republican governance in a gerrymandered, permanent majority state.

A political monoculture, like an ecological one, is vulnerable to disease, parasites and corruption.

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20:34 Tuesday, 8 October 2024

Words: 40

Stumbled on this article from 1983 looking for something else. A lot of cool ideas for the fidget spinner.

And now to figure out why half of my web page is missing...

Update: And just like that...

It's back.

Weird.

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Green is Good

17:25 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 80.01°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 155

I should have used that fancy "markup" thing that MacOS has, but this is pretty easy.

Red is Zone A. Green is Zone D. (Yellow is Zone C. I initially wrote that my neighbor across the street was in Zone C. Nope. Zone D. D!!!)

Anyway, see that corner down there where green kind of stabs into the red? That's where I live. That bit of gray road that forms a loop? That's Wood Pond Loop. The south end of Wood Pond Loop, where there's another, fractal, little corner of green marrying up to the red? That's the point where the houses on our side of the street become part of ZONE D!

Despite being backed up to the same swamp that we are!

So, yeah, we're not going anywhere. If we have to, we'll go knock on our neighbor's door.

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Drama

16:26 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.25°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 21.85mph
Words: 159

We have been "ordered" to evacuate.

In a bizarre example of cartography, we are in Evacuation Zone A, while right across the street, at eye level, is Zone D.

Mandatory evacuation for Zone A.

Zone D... you're good.

I think the difference in elevation is less than a foot, and I know that flooding is "a game of inches," but we're not leaving. It's crazy. I'm pretty confident the worst of Milton will remain well to the south. There will be some storm surge, but nothing that's going to flow up Deep Creek and into the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, on up into our neighborhood.

I will keep a weather eye out, but it's this sort of nonsense that really makes people skeptical about these evacuation orders.

Sadly, our former neighbor's mother lives in Fort Myers in a second floor condo. She's 80 years old and is not leaving. We hope she makes it.

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Easter Eggin'

14:13 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.45°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 77% Wind: 19.57mph
Words: 936

Since I seem to be blessed with an abundance of energy this afternoon (I'm usually crashing in the recliner about now.), I spent some time screwing around with the IIe with some interesting, if ambiguous, things to report.

I pulled the 8MB RAM card and re-installed the 64KB card. I also pulled the Yellowstone Liron clone from Big Mess O'Wires. (This will, or may, allow me to connect a 32MB virtual Smart Port HD to the IIe.)

Next, I ran the onboard diagnostics for the SpeedDemon. Went through the whole series of 9 tests, error-free. The SpeedDemon is good!

So I had to get the utility program for configuring the RAM card onto a 5.25" floppy, so I could use it on the IIe. The Floppy Emu is quite particular about disks having contiguous blocks. (It resembles Apple UCSD Pascal in that regard.) So the procedure I've developed is to keep a copy of the IIc's external HD image on my iMac's desktop. I mount that in Virtual II, and then copy the files I need from the disk images I've downloaded from Garrett's Workshop within Virtual II. (The Virtual II is configured as a IIe with two 5.25" disk drives in Slot 6, and two hard drives in Slot 7.)

Then I pull the micro-SD card from the Floppy Emu and mount that on the iMac. I use Disk Utility to erase all the files, and then copy the "temporary" image to the micro-SD card. (This includes another 32MB HD disk image, and dozens of 5.25" floppy disk images in another folder.) This ensures that all the files are contiguous.

The only mistake I made today was that I'd added another lo-res routine to the fidget spinner program, and didn't copy that program over to the "temp" image. Not a huge deal, but it reminds me that I'll have to be careful and copy all the files from the micro-SD card first, as a backup, just in case.

Moving on... I got the utility to configure the RAM card onto the Smart Port HD image, mounted that on the IIc and then copied the config program over to a 5.25" floppy on the IIc.

If it sounds like a hassle, it kinda is. But I'm getting used to it.

Back to the IIe with my floppy disk. I plugged the 8MB RAM card into the Aux slot. Stuck the floppy into Drive 1 and booted the IIe, pressing "Escape" before the SpeedDemon kicked in, forcing the IIe to run at regular speed. It booted fine.

I ran the configuration utility and set the card to appear as a 1MB RAMWorks card. (1MB is plenty for the kinds of things I like to do.)

I power-cycled the IIe and let the SpeedDemon take control, and it booted right into ProDOS and BASIC.SYSTEM. Hurray! Success!

Believing I'd just solved my problem, I shut down the computer and put the Yellowstone card back in Slot 5. I have another Floppy Emu inbound that's going to live on the IIe.

Just to make sure, I started the IIe... and we never made it past the ProDOS splash screen.

Doh!

I wondered if it was a speed issue, so I powered down, pulled the SpeedDemon and set the dip-switch for Slot 5 to "slow," so whenever the computer polls Slot 5 it'll do so at 1MHz.

Reinstalled the SpeedDemon and turned the computer back on. Same problem.

Doh! Doh!

Well, my energy level remains normal, but my enthusiasm is a bit diminished. I decided to just pull the Yellowstone card and try again with the new Emu gets here. It may be that the card has to have something to talk to besides the cpu. I could figure that out with the Emu I have on hand, but I'm not sure I want to know right now. Maybe later.

I had the Yellowstone in Slot 5 because the 5.25" disk controller is in Slot 6 and the ribbon cables from the 5.25" drives really crowd into the space for Slot 7, putting some strain on the card in Slot 7.

As the IIe is currently configured, it resembles the IIc here in the office. I have the IIc configured to boot from the 5.25" internal floppy, but it sees the 32MB Smart Port HD image as a drive in Slot 5.

If connecting an Emu to the Yellowstone solves the problem, I'll keep that configuration. If it doesn't, I'll move the 5.25" controller to Slot 5, and put the Yellowstone in Slot 7 with an Emu attached. The empty Slot 6 will leave room for the ribbon cables without them pressing on the Yellowstone in Slot 7.

The IIe will try to boot from the highest slot that it finds a controller in. I'll start with the Emu configured to emulate a 5.25" floppy and see what happens. If that works, I'll try an 800KB 3.5" disk emulation. That'd give me Apple Pascal 1.3 all on one disk, and I can run a script to copy all the modules I need to the RAM drive, and we're back in business.

And if all that works, I'll try a 32MB HD image.

For now, I'm pretty happy that I know the SpeedDemon is good and I've got the AUX RAM card configured for 1MB.

I just spent a couple of hours not doom-scrolling! Of course, Mitzi has been doom-scrolling and giving me updates. (Cranes in downtown Tampa that they couldn't secure in time. If you live near a crane, hide.)

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EV Benefit

12:49 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.36°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 75% Wind: 13.8mph
Words: 137

I'm sure we've all seen the videos of the Tesla self-immolating in a garage after a flood, but if you keep them dry (and "well lubricated"?), they will perform for you!

We rented an EV6 in Baltimore for the reunion. I enjoyed driving the car. It was the first time I'd experienced regenerative braking. It didn't take long to get used to it, and I really appreciated it. The dash was a bit of a mystery, and figuring out the "forward" and "reverse" thing took a few double glances.

The only things I didn't like about it were the seats (not enough lateral support), and the turning radius seemed pretty huge.

Anyway, as we adapt building codes to our new climate, we'll have to take into consideration using EVs as emergency backup power for household loads.

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Madness

11:29 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 81.41°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 16.11mph
Words: 424

The cleaning was, thankfully, relatively uneventful. Great tech and she gave me some kind of "ozone" treatment that's supposed to reduce tooth sensitivity.

To test that hypothesis, I stopped at Publix and bought a pint of Ben & Jerry's. Hey, you can't argue with research.

But Publix was very busy. The checkout bagger said it was nothing compared to yesterday.

I don't know. I think we're going to be fine. There's a front that passed over yesterday that looks like it's keeping the worst of Milton to the south of us. We will have some storm surge issues, and for folks in St Augustine, that's going to be a problem. But I don't see the Intra-Coastal flooding. I could be wrong, but I'm not worrying about it.

Milton was a big topic at the reception desk at the dentist's. I think it's because we haven't had a hurricane affect us around here very recently, and Helene was such a catastrophe, so folks' sense of anxiety is elevated.

There was no gas at the Shell station by Publix. Apparently they've been shifting the stock west to keep those stations full as the evacuations take place. They'll backfill us after. Again, I'm not worried, but we were down to half a tank and I figured I'd top it off. We don't have to do any driving, so the batteries should be adequate for the time being.

The bagger also said they were out of propane too. Everyone bought that up expecting to have to cook all the food in the fridge when the power goes out.

I don't think the power will go out. Again, most of the worst of it is going to be to the south of us and, this part of Florida has much of its utility infrastructure buried. Now, that may be a problem with severe flooding, but it pretty much limits the damage from a wind event. I think folks are just going to have a lot of extra propane for a while.

But the real insanity is constantly electing Republicans who are more interested in waging culture wars than dealing with the catastrophe unfolding before them. Part of me wants to say that we deserve everything that's going to happen to us. But I also happen to think that nobody deserves to experience this type of thing.

We didn't have to. But we didn't do anything about it either.

I guess it's like Clint says to Gene Hackman at the end of Unforgiven.

"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

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No Difference

08:09 Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 70.75°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 93

Gotta head out to the dentist's for a cleaning. Not looking forward to it with this tooth. Maybe an x-ray?

Anyway, I used Program Writer, an editor for Applesoft BASIC, to do a global search and replace on all the real variables and converted them to integer (added "%" after the variable name). Compiled the program and ran it, and it made no difference.

So I'm guessing that if Beagle Compiler doesn't see a decimal point in the value, it bypasses Applesoft's variable handler and treats it as an integer.

Anyway, gotta run...

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Fun and Games

17:36 Monday, 7 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 77.99°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 711

It's always kind of an odd time in Florida, as we're staring at an oncoming hurricane.

It's too soon to know exactly what we might expect here in northeast Florida. It won't be "nothing," but the range is fairly wide.

Anyway, spent some time distracting myself this afternoon playing around with old computers.

As I mentioned before, the Apple IIe is working in nearly all respects. I think the McT SpeedDemon hung on its self-test. I'm guessing it may have something to do with the 8MB Aux Slot memory card. In all other respects, it works just fine.

I received some old DOS 3.3 disks today, the "original" disks Apple included with the IIe. They all booted and ran fine, even accelerated, so I'm pretty confident it's solid.

This morning, I cut and pasted the Applesoft code for the fidget spinner program into an Applesoft emulator web site. It ran in 25 seconds, which is about a minute faster than it ran on real hardware. I'd been wondering how fast it would run on real hardware using Beagle Compiler, a program that came out late in the II's life that would "compile" Applesoft programs and run them much faster, depending on how much floating point math they used. Floating Point didn't "accelerate" at all after compiling.

I had to do some hunting around for the "latest" (last) version of Beagle Compiler, because earlier ones had conflicts with later versions of ProDOS or BASIC.SYSTEM. In any event, I did find one from 1990 and it was able to compile the fidget spinner and it ran in about 30 seconds. I may be able to eek some additional speed out of it if I convert all the variables to integer variables. In normal Applesoft, there's usually no value in using integer variables, except to save space as array indices. Otherwise, Applesoft converts all numbers to their floating point representation, and handles them accordingly, which eats up some time. Beagle Compiler will treat declared integer variables (n%) as integers, and that saves a decent bit of time. Haven't done that yet, but probably will, just out of curiosity.

So then I wanted to see it run on the IIe with the SpeedDemon running. That's when the fun and games started.

I couldn't seem to get booted into ProDOS. It would get to the splash screen, then crash into the monitor. It would work if I turned off the SpeedDemon first, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of having the accelerator. That was with contemporary versions of ProDOS (2018). I thought I'd try with earlier versions, more contemporaneous with the SpeedDemon and see if I'd have more luck.

Well, after working successively back, I got the original ProDOS release, 1.0.1 from 1984, to boot. From there, I first ran the fidget spinner just using the accelerator. Ran in about 25 seconds. (I should have taken notes.) About as fast Javascript emulator.

I was able to get the compiler system into memory, I worried that it might have been incompatible with the early version of ProDOS. Crossing my fingers, I ran the fidget spinner from the compiler under the accelerator.

Ran in about 8 seconds! About 10x faster than regular hardware.

If I tweak the index variables, I might get another second out of it. We'll see.

It's a bit of a bear to pull the IIe out from under the monitor stand to open it up. I'll do that tomorrow sometime and pull the 8MB Aux Slot card and put the original 64K card and see if that makes any difference on the self-test for the SpeedDemon, and then see what happens with more recent versions of ProDOS.

I may have a conflict between cpus. The motherboard has the OG NMOS 6502A installed, while the SpeedDemon is running a 4MHz CMOS 65c02. I've ordered a 65c02 for the motherboard, which was part of Apple's original IIe "enhancement" kit. But I'll swap out the memory cards first and see what difference that makes.

Anyway, something to do rather than fret about hurricanes, war in the Middle East, half of America wanting a senile ex-gameshow host, wannabe dictator as their next president, and all the other stuff that makes life "interesting."

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Fidget Spinner

06:05 Monday, 7 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 73.94°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 86% Wind: 8.99mph
Words: 188

This is kind of what I had in mind when I bought the IIc. I sat in the recliner yesterday with the IIc in my lap, wired to the 32" TV on the wall, playing around with Applesoft and lo-res graphics.

I'd do one routine, then change it a bit to do something else and again and again. Of course there were glitches, but it's simple stuff so it was easy to find them.

It was relaxing. The *click* of the Alps key-switches on the 4100 IIc are mellow, but "techie." Just a way to pass the time.

(I guess I should warn anyone susceptible to adverse visual stimuli that this might be problematic.)

Hey, it's better than doom-scrolling.

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Speed Test

10:28 Sunday, 6 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 74.61°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 897

As a distraction from everything else that's going on in the world, I played around with the Apple IIc and Apple IIe yesterday.

I can sit in the recliner with the IIc in my lap and type in little BASIC programs to draw lo-res graphics on the screen. I have a composite to HDMI adapter connected to the video expansion port on the IIc, and it does a pretty great job. The only weakness is that it's essentially doubling the screen and outputting a 640x480 signal. The TV doesn't really recognize that aspect ratio, so it's somewhat stretched. Not a big deal, it's not really noticeable.

The thing that was useful, in terms of improvement, was turning up the settings in the TV to "Vivid." Much better. I'm even able to read 80-column text sitting in the recliner.

So I did that for a while, but I still find myself running out of gas at some point. I didn't sleep well on Friday night, so I spent a lot of time napping yesterday. (I also still have some residual crud going. Yesterday, I was hoarse and had to keep clearing my throat. Tooth is still sensitive, but seems to be improving, albeit slowly.)

Anyway, I rallied yesterday evening and decided to go look at the IIe. I hadn't checked out the disk drives on it yet, and I wanted to see if they were working. I have a diagnostic program on a 5.25" floppy, and it booted that okay. I ran through all the CPU tests, and they all passed, as I'd kind of expected.

I wanted to do a read/write test on the drives, so I needed to format a blank 5.25" floppy. I just got a box of 10 "new, old stock" disks on Friday, so I pulled one of those out and stuck it in Drive 1 to format it. The drive made all the usual noises, so I went on to do the read/write test.

Failed.

Hmmmm...

I figured I'd try Drive 2, and since Drive 1 had failed, I'd do the format all over again with Drive 2. Well, looking at the disk I'd just removed from Drive 1, "Saint Hopper be praised!" there was a desiccated dead long-winged fly on the disk. Probably from inside the drive. Now, I don't know if that was the source of the failure, because it was on top of the disk and it's read from the bottom. But I blew the corpse away and stuck the disk in Drive 2.

All tests passed.

Figured I'd try Drive 1 again, and likewise.

So far, everything on this machine has checked out. It came with a parallel interface card, two 1200 baud internal modems (one just lying loose inside the cabinet, a 64K Aux Slot memory card, and the drive controller. I'd removed the cards but the Aux Slot and drive controller, and it works like a champ.

I bought a new-production 8MB Aux Slot memory card and installed that in place of the 64K card and ran the memory test again. The diagnostic software only seemed to recognize the first 64K, but it passed the card.

It's awkward working on the IIe with the monitor stand and the System Saver, so I decided that was enough for one evening. I figured I'd play with it a bit this morning.

I'd spotted an McT SpeedDemon accelerator card on the auction site, and one thing led to another and I bought it. A pretty good deal, compared to the Applied Engineering Transwarp, and the Titan accelerators. They each have onboard memory that essentially replicates the IIe's motherboard memory. The Transwarp actually has 256KB, and will use the additional memory as a RAM disk, or to "expand" AppleWorks (allow you to have more files active on the desktop). The SpeedDemon has 16KB of cache memory, 8KB of code, and 8KB of "tag" memory. In terms of performance, it's usually just as fast as the others, sometimes faster. If you're really bored, or interested, you can check the comparison here. Note that it includes a number of "modern" accelerators. I had a FastChip before, and it was a screamer. The SpeedDemon is impressive though.

It has a built-in self test, and it'll test Aux memory. It's running now. It's either hung, because of an incompatibility with the modern card, or it just takes a long time to test 8MB of memory. It hasn't failed though, because that would give an unambiguous result. I'm just going to let it run for a couple of hours and see what happens. When I turn the machine on, I get the little SpeedDemon accelerated Apple logo on startup, so I'm pretty sure it's working just fine.

My big challenge now is to get it into the office somehow. I recall really enjoying playing with Apple Pascal on the IIe I had back in 2019. It ran out of a RAM disk, with the Transwarp accelerator. It wasn't as fast as using a ROM-based interpreter, like Applesoft, but it wasn't unbearable either. All the modules were available on the RAM disk, and the accelerator made compiling tolerable. I expect a similar experience with this setup. Just need to make space.

Anyway, a harmless distraction from all the awful going on in the world. Grateful to have it.

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Round Two

08:52 Sunday, 6 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.65°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 135

So Milton is a thing. (Unsure what happens to these links as time goes by.)

Pretty sure the folks on Florida's west coast aren't looking forward to Hump Day this week.

It's a good thing that Florida's Republican legislature has spent so much time, laser-focused on the important issues facing Florida. Things like de-funding public schools, attacking trans people, voter fraud, insurance "reform," micro-managing the state university system, warning people not to get the Covid vaccine. Just a remarkable display of courage and responsibility, shouldering the burdens of managing the third largest state in the Union and seeking the best possible outcomes for its citizens.

The idea of leaving Florida is beginning to take root in Mitzi's imagination.

We need to get out of here before the rush to the exits begins.

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False Economy

10:40 Friday, 4 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 83.28°F Pressure: 1019hPa Humidity: 84% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 490

This report from Reuters says that less than .5% of the homeowners in "the state's flood-stricken west" have flood insurance.

They put a couple on camera who were initially required to have flood insurance by their mortgage company, but after the flood maps were redrawn, they were no longer required to have it by the bank, and so they dropped it.

They don't say when they were no longer required to have it, just that they were required to have it for the first three years of their mortgage. The husband stated, "We're not wealthy people, so we opted out of that coverage."

Later in the report, the wife says something to the effect, "if it's $600 a month, and you have a mortgage on top of that."

The report is confusing and misleading. At some point, they could afford flood insurance, because for the first three years they did. Supposedly after the flood maps were redrawn, they were no longer required to have it, so presumably the risk was considered lower.

Now, flood insurance rates have bounced around in the last fifteen years or so. Congress mandated that FEMA make NFIP rates "actuarily sound," which meant raising them significantly, like 200-300% or more in some cases. Constituents screamed, and they revised the requirement. So I suppose it's possible that at some point they looked at flood insurance rates and were quoted $7200/year ($600 a month).

I doubt that, but I don't know where she's getting that figure. My premium in a "low risk" area is only $1000 a year. I suspect theirs would have been about that, or less.

In any event, it's a familiar argument. When I was president of our condo association board, I insisted we buy flood insurance every year. We weren't in a "flood zone," as every condo owner who scrutinized the budget for wasteful spending liked to point out. But we were less than a mile from the beach and between the ocean and the Intra-Coastal Waterway.

We could afford flood insurance. What we couldn't afford was a flood loss.

"We're not wealthy people," is an admission that you're exactly the people who should be buying insurance.

And if you can't afford the insurance, then you can't afford to live there!

This has been the great "moral hazard" of the NFIP. The rates don't reflect the risk, so people make calculations based on bad data. Our flood insurance premium has been going up more than the rate of inflation every year. I believe FEMA is trying to get rates closer to being "actuarily sound." I expect them to continue to go up every year. At some point, they may tip the scale regarding whether we stay here or not.

But, by then, I think it'll be past the optimal time to leave.

I think now is the best time to get out of here.

Before everyone else realizes it too.

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Climate Haven

15:53 Thursday, 3 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 84.22°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 17.27mph
Words: 10

Maybe scratch the Carolinas off your list of "climate havens."

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"Heads I win, tails you lose..."

15:50 Thursday, 3 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 83.68°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 17.27mph
Words: 57

Florida insurance "reform."

“There’s nothing normal about these high denial rates,” according to Martin Weiss, founder of Weiss Ratings. “They’ve been creeping up steadily for nearly two decades and have now reached alarming levels, especially among some of the biggest providers in disaster-prone states like Florida and California.”

You have to be crazy to live here.

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The Risk of Risk

10:41 Thursday, 3 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 83.34°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 124

I imagine someone objecting to my previous post, saying that no place is completely without risk. A pipe could rupture and your house floods. You could have a catastrophic house fire. (Probably started by a lithium ion battery - Just kidding.)

And that's true.

What I'm looking at here in Florida, and what all those folks are experiencing today and many others have experienced before, is a large scale disaster event. While enormous resources are brought to bear in those cases, it remains an enormous challenge.

If a single homeowner's home floods, or burns down, they file their claim and they hire a contractor and do what they need to do to get on with it.

When thousands of homeowners' homes flood... Well, good luck.

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What's Your Plan?

09:22 Thursday, 3 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 79.99°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 87% Wind: 10.36mph
Words: 567

We're all preppers now.

For those affected, they're still in shock. For those of us who are unaffected, what more of a prompt would you need to begin thinking about how you assess risk, how you manage it, and what you can do to prepare for a disaster?

We're vulnerable to flooding here. It's not in a "flood zone," per se (It has a risk rating.), but virtually all of Florida is at risk for flooding.

We have flood insurance. I put the Powerwalls above the floor. We have some experience with evacuating. Mitzi has all the paperwork in a fireproof box that we can grab when we leave.

Gaps in my knowledge are what our options are in the event of a catastrophic loss. Assuming a total loss, flood insurance coverage for the structure is more than enough to pay off the balance of the mortgage. I don't know if any of our contents would be covered by our regular homeowner's policy, but I suspect not. I need to find out.

I do feel a lot better since we got the place in New York. While our homeowner's does cover "loss of use," which I think would still be in force even in a flood event, we'd be competing for housing with thousands of other people around here. Family isn't an option, and they would probably be facing their own challenges anyway. Bolting to New York would be my plan.

The question then becomes what to do about this property. If the house is a total loss, who is responsible for demolition and removal? Even if we were to rebuild, that would have to take place. I recall our condo association was responsible for that when one of our buildings burned. I suspect that, as homeowners, we would be responsible.

At that point, could we simply put the slab on the market? (I suspect we'd have to demo the slab as well. No builder is going to want to build on someone else's old slab.) Lot or slab, we'd still be responsible for HOA fees and property taxes, though I would expect the assessed value to reflect that absence of an actual house.

I used to think that any storm surge that would threaten us would include wind damage, which would invoke our regular homeowner's policy. The geography and hydrology of the gulf coast isn't the same as this part of Florida, so maybe that's still a good assessment. But the gulf is basically a basin, and when water piles up it has nowhere else to go but inland.

Trying to imagine a "worst case" scenario, I'd have to think it's one where it's not a total loss. What to do then? Is there a scenario where we take the interior down to the studs and then try and sell it? Do we have to try and do a total repair and then try and sell it? Repairs are going to be difficult, competing with everyone else for materials and labor, and then hoping you get a competent contractor.

It seems that the wisest course of action, from a risk mitigation point of view, would be to sell now and move. No history of flood. No questionable repairs.

Something to think about. I'm not sure Mitzi is there yet. I am.

She did say she thought she might be able to handle a New York winter.

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Tooling Around

12:46 Wednesday, 2 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 85.32°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 322

It's a beautiful day, as Florida days go. I've still got some remnants of Covid lingering. My nose has been running again, and some upper respiratory congestion. No fever or chills, aches or pains. And the damn tooth still hurts. And I periodically seem to run out of gas.

Slept ok last night. Wearing ear plugs again. Woke up at 0400, but fell right back to sleep. Got up at 0500. By 0930 I needed to get in the recliner and close my eyes. Didn't work very well, because the dog started whining about 5 minutes into my 15 minute snooze. I took him out and resumed for 10 minutes.

That seemed to be enough to rally for working on the IIe. Got that done and figured I'd go for a bike ride.

I worry a little bit about those folks who went charging off after supposedly being "over" Covid and developing some kind of muscle fatigue issue. So I'm taking it easy. Haven't been walking, with or without sticks. But the bike is fairly low effort.

With the 3-speed hub I have, about the max assist I can manage is level 3 (out of 5). I get going faster than I can pedal and it just feels silly. So I set it at level 2 and pedaled along with some modest resistance. Gave me an average speed of 14mph, which is still much faster than without the motor, and with far less effort.

Did my 10K loop and didn't really break a sweat. But after sitting here for a bit and then standing, I could feel it in my legs. So I did get a bit of a workout. And I did feel warm once I was inside, even in the AC. Turned the office fan on for a while to cool down.

Battery was down to two leds (40% ?), so it's on the charger.

Anyway, the beat goes on...

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Debate

12:37 Wednesday, 2 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 85.59°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 150

The vice presidential debate was everything I expect in my American politics.

Boring.

Apart from the fact that I can't stand J.D. Vance, even when he's on his best behavior, it was a snoozer. I went into the office to read some old computer stuff and kind of half-listened for anything exciting.

I did catch the part where the whining punk was bitching that he was being "fact checked," and the moderators tried to talk over him. The producers blew it on that, I think. They should have muted his mic immediately. They left their moderators out there trying to wrangle that misogynistic asshole, and it wasn't a good look for anyone.

Even at his best, J.D. Vance just sounds condescending to me. Anyway, that's me. I'm biased.

Nothing-burger. Just the way I like a VP debate. No flies, no hits, no errors, nothing meme-worthy.

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RIFA Removed

12:23 Wednesday, 2 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 86.05°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 65% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 262

I didn't get around to it yesterday, but this morning I went out to the garage to poke around in the IIe and remove any unexploded filter capacitors.

The Apple II power supply is built like a tank, and I'd forgotten what a pain in the ass it is to work on. But, perseverance paid off, and I got the circuit board out of the enclosure. (Leave it wired to the plug, you can still work on it. Ideally, you'd remove the plug and it looks like it's crimped on. I think I left it connected the first time I did this several years ago.)

Sure enough, the RIFA was still there and intact. I was kind of surprised, given the age of this IIe (a Rev A, probably manufactured in 1982). But the machine came as part of a package that included a Kensington System Saver (a fan and surge suppressor that would hang off the side of the Apple II and draw air across the card bus). Maybe the ventilation offered a cooler environment and helped to increase its longevity. I wasn't going to gamble on it though.

The power supply works without the capacitor, so rather than dig through my parts drawer, I just unsoldered it. Now I should add a sticker to the power supply noting its removal. If I should die and someone gets the IIe, they'll know they don't have to worry about the "magic smoke."

I still need to hook up the two Disk ][ drives and check them out, but I'm pretty confident they'll work.

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Maintenance

13:09 Tuesday, 1 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 87.31°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 254

Got the replacement keys I ordered for the //c. Seller didn't have an up-arrow in stock, so I've ordered one of those from another seller for a much higher price. Replaced the broken key switch and got the keycaps all installed. The replacement "D" key is a different color or shade of gray, but it's not super-noticeable.

I discovered the space bar was damaged. The little clips that secure the metal bar are broken, so the right side of the bar won't depress the key switch. I'm looking for a replacement, but there don't seem to be any available at the moment. The little brown clips are also on the shift keys, so I may order one of those and try to graft them onto the space bar.

I may go out this afternoon and open up the IIe again, and pull the power supply. I just need to see what the Rifa capacitor situation is. They may have blown years ago, in which case no big deal. If not, I need to pull them and spare myself the "magic smoke" ordeal.

The larger issue is finding space for the IIe and the //c. I'm reluctant to leave the IIe in the garage because, while it's largely climate-controlled these days, the leaf blower is often used to remove debris from Mitzi's landscaping efforts. Stuff goes everywhere. I sometimes find the workbench covered with fine dirt and crud, and there's little I can do about it. I hate yards and yard work.

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Crud Continues (Kinda)

13:02 Tuesday, 1 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 87.31°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 1.01mph
Words: 115

I now have a runny nose again. Not as bad as it was at first, but still a surprise.

My tooth is somewhat(?) better. It's still quite sensitive, but it's in the 8-9 range. If I'm careful, I can manage to eat nearly anything I want, although there will be some pain.

Mitzi and I are back in the same bed, and we're dog-sitting. I suspect that's kind of affecting my sleep. I'm actually feeling more tired now than I was when I was taking the Paxlovid. But a nap mostly restores my energy level, for a while anyway.

If the tooth didn't hurt, I'd say I was pretty much done with Covid.

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Editor's Note

06:46 Tuesday, 1 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 76.44°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 0mph
Words: 99

For those who may feel that I'm being a little too harsh on Mr. Millinor, please note that I know we're living here on borrowed time. If we have a catastrophic loss, we are not "rebuilding" here.

There may be questions regarding HOA requirements and so on, but the "concept of a plan" is to use the insurance proceeds, such as they may be, and pay off the mortgage. Do what we have to to scrape off the slab, sell the lot and move. Get the hell out of Florida. Let some other fool assume this risk.

Borrowed time.

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A More Sober Note

06:45 Tuesday, 1 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 76.44°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 0mph
Words: 23

This video tells a different story. Same place, different people.

And a closing shot that offers at least a glimpse of the truth.

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Good Ol' Boy

06:36 Tuesday, 1 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 76.44°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 96% Wind: 0mph
Words: 57

It seems Shannon Millinor, Good Ol' Boy from the preceding post, is something of a community spokesperson and this ain't his first rodeo.

Or hurricane.

Where can we find an accounting of state and federal dollars that went into Keaton Beach a year ago after Idalia?

Put a number on what "we" are doing.

Year after year.

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"We will rebuild..."

06:14 Tuesday, 1 October 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 76.82°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 0mph
Words: 274

Uh, who is "we," kemosabe?

Here it is, the archetypal disaster report, closed on a note of earnest, homespun resilience. "We will rebuild."

Nowhere in the report is our stalwart survivor interrogated as to just exactly how, or who "we" represents.

Because, as sure as I'm sittin' here, our straw-hatted Good Ol' Boy doesn't have the resources to rebuild. And by "we" he means that you and I and every other sucker is going to have to pitch in and help him enjoy "our little paradise."

At least between catastrophic storms anyway.

We already subsidize living on the beach for those who wish to embrace that risk. We shovel tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into the ocean to "renourish" the sand the ocean washes away. An ocean that's rising, and wave action that's growing more energetic with increasing average wind speeds. We pay higher insurance rates all over the state, in part, to offset the risk Good Ol' Boy takes on to live where he does.

Folks in Kenosha, Wisconsin are helping Good Ol' Boy live in his little paradise with their federal tax dollars spent by FEMA.

Good Ol' Boy doesn't care.

I love the way PBS just ignores the question. Sure, it might be too much to put it directly to Good Ol' Boy in his hour of suffering. But they could have asked someone. Illuminated this illusion that "we" isn't just Good Ol' Boy and his fishin' buddies.

"Other folks got their stuff." Yeah, "their stuff" is subsidizing his dumb ass.

Florida. You have to be insane to live here.

Or a dumb ass.

Unsure which category I'm in.

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