A stump removal kit

It's not super hard, you just need some things:

1. A chainsaw
2. Some shovels
3. Rope
4. Trailer hitch
5. Neighborhood friends
   

 I was part of #5.  Been a while since I dug up a stump.

Thoughts on hurricane prep

Overall we are pretty pleased with how our preps went.  We have a "hurricane kit" which is 3 storage tubs of stuff plus water jugs and equipment like a generator.

I plan on adding a set of tiler's knee pads to the kit for when I have to be on my knees setting up the hurricane shutters.  I also think I'll add another 5 gallon gas can, just for an extra window.  That will give be about a week of generator time.  

I'll also get a one gallon gas can so that I don't have to lift 5 gallons of gas to gas up the cars.   I don't like to keep gas around when we don't need it because you have to put in a stabilizer and it still ends up getting gunked up.  I just fill up the cars (which keeps me out of the post-storm lines at the gas station) but transferring it to make the lift lighter would be good.

With the water cans we were in good shape, and we filled up the bath tub and washing machine for wash water.  I am pretty comfortable that we could have ridden out a week fairly easily, maybe two with our water filters.

I'm thinking about getting Starlink for Internet because that will be back as soon as the storm passes; no linemen needed.  The kit is $350 and install is ~ another $350.  Not sure I want to spring for that right now.

I do think that a battery radio with AM/FM/Short Wave needs to be an addition to our kit.

I'm shocked at the number of neighbors who had essentially no preps at all.  This was maybe a good window into what things might be if something serious happens.  Since I'm the guy with the loud generator, this would make me a magnet.  Ugh.

Well that was different

Back now - the Internet connection returned from where hurricane Milton blew it away to late last night.

We had a fair amount of damage.  We figured we did when we heard the hurricane make weird noises on the roof.  Ah, well - Florida.  You catch a Cat 5 over your house every now and then.

I'll put up some thoughts later, but the one that really stands out is how I was the only guy with a working generator.  Even people with medical devices that plug into the wall didn't have anything.  It didn't look like most people did any prepping at all other than grab some extra toilet paper and maybe a case of water bottles.

I'm glad that I went to Home Depot for roof tiles on Thursday afternoon - there aren't any within a hundred miles now.  We're newbies in Florida and even we know that was going to happen.

Well that went by fast

Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind.  Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.

So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:

Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.

...

While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.

Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.

Sweet Sixteen

This blog is sixteen years old today.  Dang, in a couple of years it will be able to vote.

Lots of changes in the last sixteen years.  I started blogging because of the Heller decision.  The gun control wars continue, but it's an entirely different landscape today than it was then.  Good.

I do miss a bunch of the old regular blogs I used to link to - Gormogons, Aretae, Fosetti, a bunch of others.  Miguel has now joined them.  I can understand the feeling as I came within a whisker of giving up myself 9 or 10 years ago.

It's weird that the blog has been around long enough that it saw Wolfgang's entire life, from when I first got him to that last awful day.  I still go back through the "Wolfgang" tag once in a while.  He's a dog that is taking some getting over.

The blog saw me move from Massachusetts to Atlanta to Maryland to Florida.  That's a lot of moving around in not a lot of time.

And it let me introduce The Queen Of The World to you.  She kind of scratched her head at the whole blogging thing at first, but she's the one who suggested I post about film scores and Dad Jokes.  I need to do more of both of those.

Because the old passionate topics - gun control, global warming, politics - have gone stale for me.  I've said pretty much all I have to say on them, and have come to realize that the world has gone mad and shouting into the wind is just adding hot air to cold.  I actually feel better doing Dad Jokes, not getting myself all wound up.  

The Queen Of The World has helped here as well.

I emailed Miguel when he hung up his blogging spurs to tell him that I was sorry to see him stop but understood his motivation.  He was very gracious in his reply, complimenting my stuff - but I am convinced that my best blogging days were long ago, 2009-2012 or so.  That's a decade in the rear view mirror.

So apologies if this place isn't what it used to be.  I'm not what I used to be, and that is probably a good thing.

In any case, when I put up my first post, what I did not expect at all was:

16 years
Almost 14,000 posts
Over 50,000 comments (!!!)
Over 14 Million page views (!)

I guess that predicting the future is hard, especially about things that haven't happened yet ...

Anyway, thank you to everyone who stops by here.  It's the readers - and especially the commenters - that make this place what it is, and keeps me coming back.

Operation after action report

So yesterday had the expected and the unexpected.  The procedure itself went smoothly - it was a Mohs surgery, where they shave off layers of skin and then have a pathologist analyze them under a microscope.  If there's cancer in the cells, then GOTO 1 and repeat.  Keep going until there's no cancer left.  Simples.

I assumed (correctly) that they'd numb my ear right up so I wouldn't feel a thing.  What I hadn't expected was that I would hear everything, up close and personal.  Scrapey-scrapey.  Then when they were done they cauterized the area, which kind of sounded like crackle-crackle.  And the whiff of black smoke that floated past and the smell of burnt barbecue just added to the whole experience.

Still, it's better than cancer.

My cancer was Squamous Cell Carcinoma, the middle (on the deadly scale) skin cancer.  The one you want if you get one is Basil Cell Carcinoma, which doesn't really spread.  The worst kind is melanoma.

I had noticed a bump on my ear that didn't go away.  I went to the dermatologist after a couple months because, well, it didn't seem like it was improving with age like a fine wine.  While I was there I pointed out various other bumps and blemishes which they were unconcerned with, but they told me that they weren't going to let me leave with the thing on my ear.  And so off it came.

A week later they called and said that the pathologist had determined squamous, and I had to come back in for Mohs.  And none of that waiting six months for the next open appointment slot, can I come in next week?

And so there I was yesterday.  Done and cancer free.

What was unexpected was how bad I felt yesterday when I got home.  Everything was out patient, and I drove myself.  But I kind of felt like I had been run over by a bus.  Probably it was something unrelated (summer cold) that happened at the same time.  Spent most of the afternoon in bed and crashed early, but feel pretty good now.

Lessons learned:

1. Early detection is A Very Good Thing Indeed.  When something pops up on your skin and doesn't go away in a couple of weeks, go get it checked out.
2. Wear a hat.  I've been in Florida for 4 years and do a lot of walking.  It's Florida for crying out loud.
   

Going under the knife today

Skin cancer - hey, it's Florida, right?

I expect this is just going to be a pain in the butt (well, ear) since we caught it early and since it's not the nasty variant.  Back later.

Light posting

We have family visiting, so I've been busy taking grand kids to the beach.

Posting will be light for a couple more days.  Go check out the folks on the sidebar.

The Day Is Mine, Trebek

Borepatch 2, Air impact wrench Cletus 1.

I soaked it good with PB Blaster including underneath the housing that the bolt went into.  Let it soak overnight.  Got my strongest ratchet and c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y used the cheat bar.

Out it came.  Yay, me!

Thanks to everyone who left comments yesterday.  Still not happy that a one hour job turned into a whole day, but onward!

Air Impact Wrench 1, Borepatch 0

Working on the Jeep, spinning wrenches.  Except the last guy who came near a couple of bolts torqued them down. I even got a cheat bar to get some extended leverage on the ratchet wrench.

Broke the danged wrench.  Those bolts don't want to spin.

I have them liberally soaked with penetrating oil, and will see how they are tomorrow morning.  I'd hate to have to take it to a garage to get bolts loosened.  Sheesh.

Since I have a compressor, maybe I'll just head out to Lowe's and get a danged pneumatic impact wrench.  Fight fire with fire.  But this is really annoying, turning a one hour job into an all day one, just because Cletus was in a hurry to clock out and drove the bolt down.

Excuse me, I'm off to sack Rome

OldAFSarge finds a fun site.  It clearly has an AI back end because there's no way I'm this good looking.

Oh, and how do we get to the bottom of who sacked Rome?  Better get a 1930s Gumshoe:

Yeah, I did The Queen Of The World as the Queen of the World.  And as a mermaid.  It's awesome.

Highly recommended.

The (Blog) year in review

Goodbye 2023, and good riddance.  Hello 2024 - may it be better than the last year.

2023 saw 1.5M page views which was pretty good.  Strangely, a lot of this was traffic spikes (mostly from Google) to more or less random old posts.  The steady-state traffic seems to be around 2500 page views a day.  Still pretty good especially considering how infrequently I post these days.

2023 saw all of you leave over 1600 comments, which is great.  I don't do a great job replying to comments but read (and appreciate) them all.

Top posts from 2023:

Picking a strong password
I am TJIC (from 2011)
Unplug your Ring cameras
For Sale, NASA Security Van
Breaking the Youtube ad/spy algorithm
New Jersey Supremes to cops: get a wiretap order
S.S. Minnow still going strong after 60 years
Finally some better medical device cyber security
Be careful with Ring doorbell video cameras
The Renaissance is being blogged (from 2010)

Unsurprisingly, these are all security related (well, the ones from 2023).  That makes sense.

Thanks to the top referring sites: Knuckeldraggin My Life Away, The Ferrel Irishman, Raconteur Report, Normal American, The Silicon Graybeard, Gun Blog Blacklist, Busted Knuckles, Captain Capitalism, and Old NFO.

Surgery today

The Queen Of The World is having a cataract removed.  Unfortunately, then she'll have a clear view of me.

Getting old is not for sissies.

Storm update

The Hurricane stayed to the west out in the gulf and blew past us.  Lots of rain and wind but nothing more.  A neighbor threw a hurricane party and everyone danced in the rain.

But there's not a generator to be had within 100 miles.

Alan Silvestri - Suite from Grumpy Old Men

Tomorrow is my 65th birthday.  This is somewhat surprising, even if not unexpected - I like to say that 30 was the best 30 years of my life.  But I'm officially an Old Fart now.  At least I'm not (usually) grumpy.

And so to today's film music.  Alan Silvestri wrote what could have been a mid-19th Century overture for the 1993 film.  He was director Robert Zemeckis' go-to composer, writing the music for (among others) Back To The Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump (for which he scored an Oscar), Night At The Museum, and The Avengers.  Pretty good for a guy who showed up in Hollywood with $50 in his pocket, and who when he was offered to compose the music for his first film (some long-forgotten B-list flick) went out to the bookstore and got a book on how to compose.

I'd say he learned pretty darn well.

15th Blogiversary

Actually it was a couple days ago.  Seems like kind of a long time.

Thanks to co-blogger and Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 who also started his blog around the same time but who has been writing here for years and years.

Also, I'm trying to convince The Queen Of The World to write here sometimes.  Leave a comment on what you think of that idea.

A message to commeter Birdchaser

You will remember the header at the cop of the comment box: Remember your manners when you post.

You didn't.  Boy, howdy.

Your comment didn't make it through moderation because of your very disrespectful and profane attack on me.  This is my place, not yours.  I don't care that you feel really really strongly about Donald Trump.  Cathedra mea, regulae meae.

I've only banned one person in the 15 year run of this blog (my abusive ex-wife).  Congratulations - you're number two.

Go away and don't come back.  All comments from you will be nuked without being read.

This week has been living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Monday was Mom's funeral, delayed by Covid and family illnesses.  She's now with Dad for Eternety.

Yesterday and the day before it was cleaning out younger brother's (formerly Mom's) house.  He was a complicated guy, and the drugs were a part of that.  It seems that he was a fan of nitrous oxide.m  We disposed of all of that, so the house is straighter and cleaner than it's been for years.  But for both those days I was surrounded by ghosts.

Now I'm flying home, on the one-month anniversary of the day we had to put Wolfgang down.  It sure would be nice to have one of his greetings when I get there but the best I can hope for is his ghost.

I've had quite enough of death this week, thank you very much.  Would not recommend.

The Christmas Cold

That would be mine.  We had to cancel Christmas dinner with friends - anyone who's had the good fortune to eat one of her banquets can imagine just how disappointed they must have been.  Tomorrow I hardly got out of bed at all.  Poor Wolfgang hasn't had his proper walks but since he's in his Golden Years he wasn't bouncing off of walls like he would have a few years ago.

It wasn't the 'rona - I did a home test which came back negative.  Not sorry about that - it wasn't a lot of fun a year ago.

But it seems to be a cold - 48 hours later I'm on the uptick.  Blogging should be back to normal soon. 

Ahem

Good Lord, it's been almost a week since I last posted.  Family things have been front and center, and hopefully are getting worked out. 

A more normal posting schedule will commence.