Pecos Hank on YouTube has an excellent year end video showing many highlights of storm chasing season in 2024. His videography is an inspiration for me.
If you take a look at 14:16, you’ll see me parked and capturing the Eldorado and Duke, Oklahoma tornado back on the 23rd of May. Seeing me in someone else’s storm chasing video just made my day.
Jamie graduated from barber college today. We are very proud of him. His state board exam is next week.
This photo was taken on Tuesday evening.
We washed Truman’s cat bed this week because it was way overdue for such attention. Apparently he is not pleased by this action because up until yesterday afternoon, he chose to ignore his cat bed and sleep on top of his little cat-hideaway, which he almost never does.
At least he’s keeping an eye on the Network Attached Storage (NAS) server.
This photo was taken Friday afternoon. All is back to being correct in the cat world.
I took a look at the news today and saw what’s going on with the U.S. budget and how the government will probably shut down tonight. I feel bad for all of the working Americans that will be affected by this action. Apparently there was a bipartisan bill to keep things moving but at the last minute Sissy Space X got the House Republicans to kill the thing, so now there’s a scramble.
There’s always a scramble.
I’ve been seeing inklings of how Musk appears to be calling all the Presidential-elect shots and basically telling Trump to do. I guess since Musk isn’t eligible to be President of the United States, he just bought his way to the top instead and is telling the old guy what to do.
That’s not how any of this works, but I gave up that dream at the beginning of November when voters decided one term of chaos wasn’t enough. I blathered on about it on Facebook just because I could. I really didn’t think the Co-Presidency would be so blatant this time around. I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was. Or, I guess I had more faith in the system that it deserves.
For now I shall go back to keeping my head down like I’m sitting in Room 108 in the elementary school, waiting for the buzzer to ring so I know it’s time go do something.
In the meanwhile, I am focused on things that give me joy, such as my video production, geeky things like cash registers, visiting with family and friends, and trying to embrace the holiday spirit.
It’s time to shut the news back off and find some joy out there, anywhere.
This really warms my geek heart. An Indiana bakery is still using Commodore 64 computers for their point of sale system.
OK, I’ve kind of lost interest in the litany of superhero movies we’ve been assaulted with over the past few years. However, the trailer for Superman, coming out in July ’25, looks really interesting and has a beautifully familiar feel to it.
As a young lad I was always fascinated with the business calculators in use at the family owned lumber yard and contracting business. I suspect Grandpa Country was a bit of a geek at heart, as he invested wisely in these sorts of pieces of technology. For example, the Accounts Receivables at the store were maintained in house, originally using a Burroughs Bookkeeping machine purchased in the 1950s. I never saw this machine, but being the dork I was and continue to be, I could tell which entries on old ledger cards were made with this machine, just by the way the printing appeared on the cards.
In 1972 (I tracked down the exact date by the change in dated entries on the older ledger cards), the Burroughs machine was replaced by an NCR Class 160 Bookkeeping Machine.
I can easily remember this bookkeeping machine, as it’s what was in use when I did the accounts receivable for the family after Grandma Country retired but before my aunt took over the duties for the family business. I learned how this machine worked by watching Grandma Country do the invoice posting every morning during summer vacation. I found the machine fascinating. It was replaced by a computer in 1990 or so, running software I wrote that basically replicated the functions of this wonderful piece of technology.
Grandpa invested in the right tools and that’s something I learned from him.
The store didn’t have a proper cash register of the time, much to the chagrin of my technological ways. Instead, there was a very large “black box” built into the sales counter. The box had a tractor-fed stream of blank invoices that were there for handwritten detail, and a journal tape where we wrote the sub total of the sale, followed by a dash, and then the amount of tax charged on the sale. When the lever was pulled to advance this journal tape, the cash register drawer popped open. At least, until that functionality was disabled because of the amount of paper wasted just to pop open the drawer in a “No Sale” situation.
All of the calculations were performed on adding machines/calculators made by Monroe Systems for Business. We had a few of these machines scattered around the business, one in the back office, one on the sales counter etc. Because they were so robust and had some nifty features for their day, they lasted for literally decades. In fact, the Monroe 525 calculator, purchased in the mid 1970s, lasted until the store was sold to a new buyer in 2010.
For the back office there were printing models of these Monroe machines and they were the closest thing we had to something like a cash register.
Today I did a little search on Monroe Systems for Business and found that they’ve continued the tradition of quality calculating products, and the robust functionality is present in their equipment over 50 years later.
I was happy to see the layout of the keyboard is nearly the same as it has been for decades, and the approach to separating multiplication/division functions from the add/subtract/accumulator functions is intact.
My geek heart is happy. I might have to get my hands on one of these machines for my office.
The latest update to iOS (the operating system on the iPhone), dubbed 18.2, brings more Apple Intelligence “goodness” to the platform. That is, if you’re fortunate to have an iPhone 15 Pro or new iPhone. I guess Apple Intelligence doesn’t work at all on the iPhone 15, or any of the earlier models. Because, planned obsolescence and all that.
Part of the new “goodness” to iOS is automatic Mail categorization, something Gmail has had for over a decade on all devices. Through the mystery, mystique, and magic of Apple Intelligence, the default Mail.app on iOS 18.2 now sorts your email into “Priority” and other buckets. It apparently also only shows the unread count for those messages in “Priority”; the rest of your messages are on their own. So, if Grandma has written you a message that does not meet the Apple Intelligence Fairy Dust and Moonbeams algorithmic threshold, Grandma is shoved in a box and does not get to be represented in the red bubble count.
I wasn’t a fan of this new sorting, because like all things relying on A.I., and Apple Intelligence in particular, the success rate is seemingly below the 80/20 threshold. On Monday I turned it off completely, but apparently I didn’t do all the things to the settings that aren’t in the settings menu (they’re under three new dots that appear in the upper right hand corner), and I still received a number of Priority Notifications from Apple Intelligence, which is basically Siri with an attitude, indicating that I had a number of invoices sent to my PayPal account. Said invoices totaled thousands of dollars.
There was absolutely NOTHING in these email messages that looked suspicious, because iOS’s Mail.app basically hides everything above a first grade comprehensive understanding of how the world works, so I had to jump on my Linux box to look at the headers of these emails. But first, I jumped onto PayPal directly to see if I had any outstanding invoices.
I didn’t.
A look at the headers and other underpinings of these emails revealed that the craftsmanship of the messages was fairly impressive, though there were some obvious clues that the emails were indeed spam. One of these clues indicated that they were sent to a distribution list, and my email address wasn’t showing anywhere in the “To:” field, it had to be appearing in the “BCC:” field.
I really feel like Apple Intelligence, and A.I. in general, should have figured this out. I mean, it’s Intelligence and it’s a pure Apple experience, right?
I marked the messages as spam and went on with my day. A little while later I received a Priority! Notification! on my phone indicating another invoice was sent to PayPal, with payment expected post haste.
I didn’t even bother looking at the message. I searched to see how to really turn off this Apple Intelligence foolishness around my mailboxes off and then I went one step further.
I completely deleted my PayPal account.
With the tap to pays and shake your mama ways to pay for things these days, PayPal is fairly redundant and unneccessary in my life. I don’t like my credit card number hanging out there with random people, and since I don’t really use the platform, there’s no reason for my credit card number to hang out with those people.
So, Apple Intelligence “prioritizing” my email and PayPal altogether have both left my building.
Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.
Weird? Eccentric!
