Update

00:11 Wednesday, 14 September 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 84.04°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 5.75mph
Words: 734

Started a couple of posts here since we've been back, but never finished them. Figured I'd better get going, or September would be gone before I posted anything!

The wedding trip was great. The smoothest experience I've had in air travel in many years. Everything from the drive to the airport, to the drive home at the end. Had some mild turbulence that interrupted cabin service for a while, but that's never been a problem for me.

I thought I was going to have a TSA pre-check problem again. Mitzi's boarding pass had it, mine didn't. I tried calling Delta, but it was futile. When we got to the ticketing and baggage check-in counter, we stood in the line for People With Problems™, and after a Delta rep assured himself that we had a problem, we were allowed to remain in that line, which was much shorter than the baggage check line.

When it was our turn, the agent took care of the pre-check issue and I asked if we could check our bags there as well, thinking we'd have to go back to the end of the baggage line. Nope! She took our bags right there. We'd already checked them at the kiosk, all we needed to do was drop them off.

Terminal wasn't crowded. Pre-check line was short. I wasn't pulled aside for "special screening." Pretty amazing.

Plane arrived a little late, departed a little late, arrived in Boston on time. It was non-stop from Jax to Boston, which was also nice.

On the flight back, my boarding pass showed I had pre-check, so whatever that problem was seems to have been corrected now. Got to the baggage carousel just as the bags were coming off, and ours were among the very first! Went out to the parking shuttle and walked right onboard.

Weather was great on the way home, traffic was sane.

It was amazing. I'll treasure the memory. May sound weird, but flying has been nothing but an ordeal for me for years, ever since 9/11.

Boston was great as well. Weather was outstanding! Stayed at a new hotel at the north end, walking distance to all the usual stuff, except the T. There was this Haymarket open-air market thing on Friday and Saturday, which has apparently been a going concern for two centuries. Really enjoyed that. So many different people and languages, felt like I wasn't in North America.

Took the metro ferry over to the Navy Yard to see USS CONSTITUTION, so spent a few minutes on the water. Cheap ticket too. Mitzi got the OOD to bong me off the ship. For the unfamiliar, that's a courtesy that's extended to officers (usually O-5 and above, otherwise you'd be ringing the bell all day) as they arrive and depart the ship. Mitzi was chatting up the OOD and mentioned I was a retired commander, and he said they'd bong me off if I wanted. Well, Mitzi wanted. I was buying a ball cap and a coin, so this transpired without my knowledge. She told me what she'd done, so I put on my CONSTITUTION ball cap, saluted the OOD and he rang the bell four times and announced "Commander, United States Navy, Retired, departing!" I saluted the ensign and walked down the brow as people clapped.

Got kinda gooey there for a minute or so.

We switched hotels over to Cambridge for the wedding. Walked around MIT a bit. Enjoyed seeing all the kids getting settled into their dorms. A lot of mini-fridges being carried around. I live in an over-55 community, and it was genuinely refreshing to see so many young people in one place. A lot of good energy there. Hope they can fix the mess we've left them. I think they've got what it takes.

Wedding was marvelous. It was the warmest day of the weekend, but it wasn't bad by Florida standards. Saw some old shipmates, classmates and friends.

So, all in all, I'm glad we went, carbon notwithstanding.

Oh, I tried out my Travel Notes shortcut. It's not practical. It's too slow. I suspect it's the steps adding the location and weather data. You press the icon and wait. And wait. And then the dictation window would finally appear. Except sometimes when it wouldn't. Not sure what was up with that.

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Photos and PowerMate

01:37 Wednesday, 14 September 2022
Current Wx: Temp: 83.44°F Pressure: 1010hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 4.61mph
Words: 797

I have an old Griffin PowerMate, which I suspect I've had for about 18 years. It's the USB version, which was introduced in 2002. It'd been sitting in a box of old computer junk in the garage, and I pulled it out when I was looking for something else some time back.

It's a pretty cool little device, but I never really found any particular use for it. Since I started getting interested in "automating all the things," I thought I'd take another whack at using it.

After finding a copy of the software for it, I can't recall where, it's still been just sitting on my desk; but something occurred to me the other day that got me playing with it again.

I have a bad habit with Safari of just opening links in new tabs and then either forgetting about them, or thinking I'll go back to that one soon, and then I can't find the tab I want! So I end up clicking on them individually, these tiny tabs, looking for the one I wanted, closing the ones I'd forgotten I'd opened. Tedious with the trackpad, so I looked up the keyboard shortcut: CMD-Shift-(right or left) arrow. CMD-W to close the tab.

Did that for a bit, but I'd often forget what it was and have to look it up again and that's when it occurred to me to try and make use of the PowerMate.

So I've got a set of four triggers for Safari, Rotate Right, Rotate Left, Normal Press, and CMD-Normal Press. These are next tab, previous tab, close tab and Undo. Works better than using the trackpad, and since I'm usually "browsing" just using the trackpad and gestures, it doesn't involve putting my hands on the keyboard. I just shift my hand a little over to the left to the PowerMate and twirl away. If I accidentally close a tab, I have to use my left hand to press the CMD key and just press the button again.

I was going through all the pics I took in Boston, and it occurred to me that the PowerMate might make a better interface than the trackpad for much of the initial triage. To be honest, you can do most of the stuff with the keyboard, but my habit is to do most of it with the trackpad. There are a couple of items that are inconvenient with the trackpad, or fiddlier than using the keyboard, like deleting an image. You can do it from the contextual menu, but that's a two-finger tap, then a scroll to the correct menu item. Fiddly. Same thing with rotate left or right and making a favorite.

So this morning I made a set for Photos. Rotate Right and Rotate Left are like using the arrow keys on the keyboard. This has the advantage of avoiding the "sliding" animation when the images are full-sized, which makes it easier to detect differences between two similar images in a sequence. A Normal Press toggles between thumbnail and full-size view (or single image view, it's not at 100% pixel size). A Long Press toggles Edit on and off. CMD-Press favorites an image. CTRL-Press deletes an image. Shift-Press is Rotate counterclockwise, and CMD-CTRL Press is undo.

You may have noticed I didn't make use of the Option key, and that seems to be because Photos eats the Option key before PowerMate can get it. If you press Option in the library, you'll see the Rotate button reverse direction. Any button action I tried using the Option key failed.

Played around with that a bit after I'd set it up and it works pretty well. I had to figure out how to slow down the rate at which rotation is converted to key-presses, but once I did that everything went very smoothly.

So the workflow is something like this:

Import a bunch of images, view them full size, scroll one to the next, delete clinkers, favorite obvious good ones, rotate any that need to be rotated.

Is it ideal? Perhaps not. Because I don't use the keyboard religiously, I don't remember many of the keyboard commands. The only one I knew for certain was CMD-Delete to delete an image. With the PowerMate, I only have to remember modifiers, so I think there's a better chance I'll commit them to muscle memory. Delete is the one I'll use the most, rotate the least, so delete, favorite and undo are all essentially adjacent to each other with CTRL, at very edge of the keyboard, easy to find.

Time will tell, I guess. For the moment, I'm just happy I seem to have found some use for this cool little device.

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!Star Trails

18:24 Thursday, 14 September 2023

Current Wx: Temp: 74.93°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 0mph
Words: 93

Dew point was reasonable and the sky was clear, so I pointed the EM-1 Mk3 to the sky with the 8mm/f1.8 fisheye mounted. Not a lot of excitement. Seems to be more satellites visible, I'm guessing those are mostly StarLink. Maybe an "Iridium flare" or something like it, or possibly a meteor. If I weren't a lazy man, I'd get up early and go to the beach and try to capture the comet. Bigger version at Flickr.

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New Shiny

18:35 Thursday, 14 September 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 74.93°F Pressure: 1008hPa Humidity: 94% Wind: 0mph
Words: 242

My 2019 27" iMac will update to Sonoma on the 26th. I'd have installed one of the betas, but I kind of rely on Michael Tsai's SpamSieve to help manage my inbox. I turned off the iMac when we went to Martha's Vineyard and I was dismayed by the amount of crap that filled my in-box on my iPhone.

So, I guess I'll have to buy a new desktop Mac at some point if I want to keep up with the OS updates. Security considerations seem to argue strongly for that. I'll get a couple of years of security updates after next year, so maybe 2026? '27?

Maybe the scope of the calamity we're facing will be clear to everyone by then. I watched the Apple Event like I watch a lot of things these days, realizing that it's approaching the time when they'll seem absurd. For me, they're already there. This overt display of "normalcy" (cameo appearance of "Mother Nature" notwithstanding), while fully aware that there's maybe a decade or two before cascading climate catastrophes begin disrupting supply chains to the point where new product introductions are going to be impossible. They'll likely go on, but they'll be more aspirational than anything else.

"Keep calm and carry on," and all that.

There's a fire aboard Spaceship Earth.

It's reached the life support system.

The bridge is still worried about upsetting the first class passengers.

Life goes on.

Until it doesn't.

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!These Mourning Doves

20:50 Thursday, 14 September 2023

Current Wx: Temp: 78.73°F Pressure: 1009hPa Humidity: 91% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 21

This morning's birds are these mourning doves.

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Amazing

23:29 Thursday, 14 September 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 86.94°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 71% Wind: 6.91mph
Words: 93

This is a long video in today's world. I watched the whole thing. It's pretty remarkable.

I found it encouraging and uplifting, and I'm proud of the people who made this happen. It's technical, but it's so much more than that.

Hat tip to Bill Meara of SolderSmoke Daily News, whose RSS feed brought this to my attention.

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Back In the Swamp

04:59 Saturday, 14 September 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.9°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 0mph
Words: 643

We buttoned up the place in the Finger Lakes and headed for Syracuse at 0700 on Thursday. Easy drive, and beautiful, but a bit of a hike. Flights were all on time, some turbulence coming into Jax. There were two Delta flights arriving from JFK on Thursday, and apparently we went to the wrong baggage carrousel. A purple bag, very similar, if not identical, to Mitzi's circled the carrousel three or four times, while Mitzi's never appeared.

By the time it stopped, we were convinced the owner of that purple bag had mistakenly taken Mitzi's. Seconds after I'd called the number on the tag and left a voicemail firmly asserting she'd taken the wrong bag, she appeared to collect her bag. She'd gone to get her car rental first.

D'oh!

There was an air tag in Mitzi's bag and it indicated it was within the margin of error to be "with" us. Went to the baggage claim office to investigate and I spotted Mitzi's bag as she was talking to the agent at the counter, where she learned that our flight's baggage was at that carrousel.

Weird.

Ride home was wet and we got on Philips Highway at rush-hour where there's a well known backup at Racetrack Road, which added at least 15 minutes to the ride home. Doesn't sound like much, but it adds about 30% to the travel time, and most of it is standing still, creeping forward, standing still, creeping forward... I tipped the driver an extra $20 for the aggravation. (He's our regular driver and a good one.)

It'd rained nearly every day we were gone. A lot. Neighbor said there were snakes in the road, including cottonmouths. Many reports of flooding around the area. Not the kind due to rivers overflowing, the kind due to living at sea level and having no place for the water to go when the ground is saturated. Neighborhoods were putting up "No Wake Zone" signs because the streets were flooded but people would drive through them fast enough to leave wakes that would put water into homes and businesses that might otherwise have remained dry. Folks couldn't use their bathrooms because their septic tanks were full.

And the humidity? Oy. It's wet. Florida. The whole idea needs to be seriously reconsidered.

I miss New York so much already.

We were pretty much exhausted when we got home. Mitzi had a full schedule yesterday, getting the yard done (just before it rained again), pitching a new client, and returning some items we couldn't use in New York. I had a number of packages arrive that I needed to unpack and put away someplace, so a pretty busy day that felt a lot more like Monday than Friday. The HOA sent us a nice letter that our grass was overgrown and that there were weeds in our pavers. One of the things about HOAs is it empowers people to be little nazis. They don't send around an employee to inspect for standards. Nope, it's a zealous neighbor who rides around on a golf cart, snapping photos with his phone. And the association encourages that. Gotta maintain those "property values." (Because we're in an over-55 community and we're all going to be dead soon and all we have to leave our kids is our "property values.") People wonder why I never go to the neighborhood socials.

(FWIW, Mitzi hadn't mowed, which she does pretty regularly, because she'd just put down new sod to replace the sod killed by the guy she hired to mow the grass while we were away this summer. Landscapers suck.)

IQ Fiber is supposed to be here this morning, so I anticipate we may be offline temporarily at some point. Hopefully this will go smoothly, but recent experience suggests otherwise.

It's not clear exactly when the rain will stop.

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Packages

05:29 Saturday, 14 September 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 75.83°F Pressure: 1011hPa Humidity: 95% Wind: 3.44mph
Words: 1817

One surprise on the front porch Thursday evening was the box from Swytch, the e-bike conversion from England. That was supposed to arrive in October. But, hey, I don't mind. There were three boxes from the auction site.

One was the "Apple IIc disk drive," (which included an entire Apple IIc and some manuals). The other two were an Apple IIe and an old Monitor III that were all part of one purchase.

Opening the IIc box was a disappointment familiar to many buyers from the auction site. Poor packaging. The external disk drive beat up the keyboard in transit. Several keys were broken and one switch was broken. The disk drive door was also broken. I can get replacements for the keys, but it's still disappointing. (Pack the IIc keyboard side down on some foam.) The good news is that it is otherwise fully functional. It was pretty dirty, but cleaned up well and seemed less yellowed than the other IIc I have. This was a 4000 model, which lacks the memory expansion connector on the motherboard. But it was one with an Alps keyboard (Which made the damage even more painful.)

The IIe was packaged even worse but, remarkably, arrived undamaged. The cpu was packaged with the two Disk ][ disk drives which are like Thor's hammer in terms of the amount of damage they can do. It even had the original monitor stand that Apple sold to support a Monitor III (designed for the Apple III) on top of an Apple II. Those things almost never survive.

The seller used 12-pack soda boxes (a first), and styrofoam peanuts, which I despise, as filler material. Some brown craft paper. None of which completely filled the empty volume in the box, and I don't know how everything made it here in one piece, but I'm grateful for small miracles. The Monitor III was in a separate box, similarly ill-packaged, but likewise intact.

After cleaning up the IIc and getting an inventory of keys I'll have to replace (Space bar may be a problem, there may be a piece missing.) I turned my attention to the Monitor III since that seemed like the thing that was least likely to actually work.

I plugged the IIe and the monitor in, expected the magic smoke and turned everything on. No smoke. After waiting a suitable interval for the monitor to warm up, an image appeared. Some fiddling with the controls got it stable and the damn thing works. Built in November, 1982. Image is a little biased to the left, but it works.

The Monitor III had a fabric anti-glare screen. It also had a bunch of crud on it. I used a toothbrush and warm soapy water to try and clean it. Failed. Watched a video of a guy opening one up to remove the screen and decided it was simpler to just use an Exacto knife. Screen was filthy under it, though it cleaned up pretty well; but there are still blemishes from some liquid that evidently got onto the glass. Not noticeable when the monitor is on. It's not "museum grade," but it's still pretty cool.

The IIe was intended to be an update to the ][+ that reduced costs and added modest improvements, presumably to make it more appealing for schools. It had 64K on the motherboard, while the ][+ was shipping with a max of 48K at the end of its run. You had to put a 16K "Language Card" in slot 0 to get 64K. The Language Card was developed to support Pascal as another operating system/programming language for the Apple ][.

People figured out how to bank-switch that 16K, and were creating RAM disks and expanded memory for Visicalc with it.

The Apple ][+ also shipped with 40-column uppercase only text. To get 80 columns, then the standard for "serious" computing, you had to install a video card in slot 3. The IIe added support for lower case text, and a low cost video card for 80 column text as an option. Further, that low cost 80 column card could also come with an additional 64K of memory onboard, for a total of 128K! Whoa!

When the IIe came out, I'd already sunk a bunch of money into my ][+. We're talking 80s dollars here. I bought a ][+ with one disk drive for $2500, which is north of $7k in today's money. On top of that, I put a Videx 80 column card in slot 3, bought a second disk drive, a Monitor III, and that funky plastic stand, all so I could use PIE: Writer as my word processor. So I was probably over $10k in today's dollars by the time I was done and the Apple IIe was announced. (I hesitate to consider what $5k invested in 1982 would be worth today. I could probably afford a house in the Finger Lakes.)

ChatGPT isn't so reluctant, though it does qualify everything:

Calculating the exact amount that $5,000 invested in a NASDAQ index fund in 1980 would be worth today is quite complex and would require specific data on the fund's performance, including dividends and stock splits, over the past 40+ years. However, as a rough estimate, we can consider that the NASDAQ Composite has grown from around 200 points in 1980 to over 14,000 points in 2021. This is a 70-fold increase. Applying this increase to a $5,000 investment would result in a value of approximately $350,000.

So, yeah, a house in the Finger Lakes.

While I was impressed with the expanded memory of the IIe, I didn't feel as though the additional capability really added anything to what I already had in my ][+.

Well, and this remains unclear to me even today, at some point the engineers at Apple realized they could make some relatively modest modifications to the motherboard involving the video timing signals, and they could use that 64K expansion card to increase the resolution and colors of Apple's "high resolution" graphics.

The original Apple IIe, the so-called "Rev A," shipped without those motherboard modifications, and is incapable of displaying double hi-res graphics. You're stuck with the original 280x192 in monochrome (though some fancy bit-twiddling in programming could make it appear as though the horizontal resolution was 560 pixels), and six colors (eight if you count two whites and two blacks), with the limitations of adjacent colors due to the NTSC artifacts Woz relied on to create color.

It was the addition of double hi-res graphics that made me decide I needed to get an Apple IIe. So my first IIe was a Rev B, and I bought it as a package from one of my neighbors who worked at a computer retailer. Prices had come way down, of course. I got the 128K IIe, two disk drives, and a Monitor II for $1595. I sold my ][+ setup for $900 to a co-worker. (I had that //e for probably over a decade, though I can't recall exactly what happened to it anymore. I eventually got a IIgs and used that for many years before we finally switch to a Mac with the much maligned Performa 6200CD.

I don't know how many Rev A models shipped, but they were supposedly only in the thousands; and Apple offered motherboard swaps for early buyers, so many of those were upgraded to Rev B motherboards.

Well, this IIe in my garage is a Rev A.

Wild.

It boots up with "Apple ][" at the top of the screen. When you "enhance" an Apple IIe ("enhanced" was supposedly what the originally stood for), you get a 65C02 processor, new ROMs and a new video character set that includes "Mouse Text" (for drawing GUI elements in text) and the screen shows Apple //e when you boot up.

I'm not exactly sure what I want to do about that yet, if anything at all. Presumably, I can still use the Aux Slot for memory expansion, and I could install the "enhancement" kit with the 65C02 and new ROMs. There's no real support for double hi-res graphics built into the ROM, you have to do everything in your own software but there are plenty of packages that do it for you.

I think I'm going to keep it as a Rev A machine, though I will install the 65C02. I can get the ROMxe for it, which allows you to switch in any number of ROM variations.

Anyway, seller didn't think it worked. It works. Came with two modem cards, a parallel printer interface card, a 64K aux slot card, and a disk controller card. I removed all the cards to boot it up. The RIFA caps in the power supply didn't pop, so no "magic smoke." At some point I'll have to open the power supply and deal with that. I think I still have some spares I didn't give away because I forgot I had them.

So why get a IIe if I already have two //c computers? Well, the IIe has more access to the real world. The joystick port is a 16-pin DIP connector with additional channels for game controllers, buttons and an annunciator. The cassette tape jacks are repurpose-able and absent on the //c. The memory is more readily expandable than the //c, I have to wait for someone to build a new card for it, which happens from time to time. I've already got a 4MB expansion card from Garrett's Workshop for the IIe.

If you want to play with Apple Pascal, the best way to do that is with a large RAM disk, so you're not always waiting for the editor, compiler, or filer to load from disk. I had a setup I really liked with a Transwarp accelerator card in that SUV-load of stuff I gave away. At the moment, I'm thinking that the IIe is going to be more about programming and real-world interfacing and less about game playing or graphics.

The "new" //c is a 4000 model. I'm thinking of getting another ROMXc, then seeing if I can "ROMify" Jef Raskin's "Swyftware" application. (Should be doable. It was originally available in a ROM on a peripheral card.) Then that //c could be kind of a Canon Cat. Might be fun. I'll need to see if it can talk to blank disk images on a FloppyEMU. It uses its own disk format, and the entire disk is one "file."

In the interim, there's still a lot of cleaning to do. I spent much of yesterday afternoon scrubbing nicotine off the Monitor III. The IIe is probably just as bad, and the motherboard is very dusty. Then I have to figure out where all this stuff is going to live. I need to significantly alter my "office," I'm even considering getting rid of the recliner.

Horrors!

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More Fiber

15:12 Saturday, 14 September 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.53°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 82% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 114

Well, I needn't have worried about the installation and transition to IQ Fiber. Very smooth. Tech was friendly, knowledgeable and ready to help.

They have an app to control your network and I was able to rename the default network to our previously existing network (SSID and password), which saved an enormous amount of effort in terms of getting all the "smart" devices back online.

Haven't done any really significant streaming, though I just uploaded a brief video to Vimeo and that seemed to go pretty quickly. They have to do their thing once it gets to their servers, so I'm waiting on that.

I wish everything would go as smoothly as this did.

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IIe (Rev A)

15:25 Saturday, 14 September 2024
Current Wx: Temp: 82.8°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 81% Wind: 12.66mph
Words: 300

Spent some time in the garage this afternoon with the IIe. One of the nice parts of this purchase was that a Hayes Mach 3 joystick was included. It looked pretty disgusting, and I wasn't sure how well it would work. Before doing anything else, I fired up the IIe, connected the joystick and entered a little routine to check it out.

Amazingly, it came up pretty damn near centered and responded with the full range from 0 to 255. The other joystick I bought (Apple branded, but likely from the same manufacturer who made the Hayes joysticks), needed some adjustment and didn't seem to want to offer the full range. Close enough for Choplifter and Lode Runner though!

Since this is a relatively early IIe (as a Rev A), it's in a painted case. Later, Apple went to all-plastic cases that will yellow over time. The more time I spend with this machine, the better I'm liking it. I'll probably open it up tomorrow and remove the case. I may not remove the motherboard, but I'll clear the dust somehow. Then I'll install a disk controller so I can load some software, and the memory expansion card. I'll run a utility and verify that it performs properly as an Aux Slot memory expansion card.

The biggest challenge is going to be finding a place to put it. I've had a little inspiration that may allow me to do what I want without removing the recliner. I'll need to play with the tape measure and see.

Here's a little video I made after I cleaned up the joystick and ran another test to make sure it still worked.

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Acclimated

06:52 Sunday, 14 September 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 56.17°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 2.77mph
Words: 665

We've been back in Florida for about 36 hours and one thing I've noticed is that I seem to have thoroughly acclimated myself to New York's cooler climate. Keeping the house at 77°F here is uncomfortable. I've also noticed how loud the AC is! Since we seldom use AC in New York, and when we do it's just a mini-split and it's practically silent.

More pluses for New York.

We got rid of some furniture yesterday that Mitzi had sold on Facebook Marketplace. One of the buyers was a gent from Palm Coast, originally Nashville, Tennessee. He's been in Florida for only a couple of years, but he's trying to sell his place and plans to move to Memphis. We talked about hills and Florida's terrain, we have similar views. His place has been on the market for ten months.

Here's a question for the folks who saw divine intervention in the attempt on Trump's life, what does it mean that Charlie Kirk wasn't spared?

Anyway, back to moving... I was pleased to find that all my computer history books were still on the shelves back here. That meant they weren't in a box somewhere up in New York. I grabbed a few that I'm carrying back in a suitcase. Boxing up everything else on the shelves was kind of depressing, knowing that my friends won't be accessible to me for a year or so. It's not like I read them every day, but I like knowing I can just go back to "the library" and pull one off the shelf when I want to refresh my memory about something.

We're disassembling the bed this morning and removing the mirror from the dresser. Mitzi has sold the bedroom set and someone is coming by this morning to pick it up. We'll be sleeping on the Murphy bed tonight. Tight!

Once we get everything disassembled, I'm heading out to see my kids. Easier for me to get to each of them than for us to all gather someplace at the same time. Then it'll be back here for more packing and organizing.

The "pod" arrives tomorrow and a couple of guys we've hired several times before will be here on Tuesday to load it all (hopefully?) up. Wednesday we fly back to New York and a week or so later the pod arrives at Winterfell. We're having it delivered right to the house so we can unload the couch sections and the Husky rolling workbench/toolbox right into the house and garage. The toolbox will be the first thing into the pod, because it's going to be the last thing out. It weighs several hundred pounds, so lifting it into the Maverick was never going to be an option.

It occurred to me last night that if I take both of the HomePods and the AppleTV that are still here home with us, we won't have a HomeKit hub. So I'm going to leave the AppleTV and we'll ask our realtor to mail that back to us when the house finally sells. I could "see" the Powerwalls, the hot water heater and the thermostat with just wife and the internet connection, but I don't think I could control the lights. Maybe I could if there's a Lutron app? But we also want to be able to leave a security camera and Apple Home is a better experience than Aqara's app unless you pay them for their cloud storage.

Excited to see my kids, but also to get finished packing everything up and getting it out of here. We can close remotely, so we won't have to return just for that. I'll probably be back from time to time to visit the kids, but hopefully they'll come to see us once we get the new place built. My oldest grandchildren will be graduating from high school in a few years!

Well, better grab a screwdriver and get to work.

As always, the beat goes on...

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