13-XI-2009.

00:18:21 me:
we finally have a house on the coast. The water is just a few meters from the door. About 40cm higher and we'll have to start caulking the doors and hope the walls won't leak.

00:19:52 David
Jeez, had no idea... Batten the hatches indeed!

00:22:16 me
hatches... to the basement? No basements here, we're 3m above (regular) sea level.

00:22:40 David
I see video of Virginia Beach---

00:23:22 me
link?

00:24:45 David
weather channel... (link)... "Raw: Assault on Virginia Beach"

00:45:01 me
wow... it's already covered all the sand on the beach, and that's roughly 2m. This also means all the puddles around the place are equally higher and not draining the streets... the sidewalk outside is already about 15cm deep. No school today, none tomorrow. We were smart to get a house in this area where the cables are dug in :)

01:23:17 me
water already in back yard... I guess we have maybe 20cm before the cable box on the curb gets flooded. So far so good so online.

01:27:52 David
Hope you've got some sandbags (if that helps...)

01:28:06 David
Where's the military when you need them? [Bet they're on the job though, eh]

01:28:42 me
last time (Isabel, 2003) they flew away three days in advance and returned three days after it was all over. ... I'm on the job :) ... and mail was delivered today... well, while it was still possible to drive.

04:14:06 me
25cm to the door... and still online :) ... lifted all the cables, all electronics and the guinea pig off the floor... fingers crossed. Fingers crossed for tomorrow. Should stop by saturday.

15:02:12 me
the water is subsiding slowly, after having rearranged our garden in a special way.

16:13:45 Jan
Are your feet stil dry ??

16:14:10 me
Yes... the highest was about 25cm below floor level :)

16:14:43 Jan
BTW, image is loading very, very slowly

16:16:08 me
though I got one foot wet yesterday, taking a picture of daughter's car from the backyard. A truck passed and sent a wave. I use free hosting at doteasy.com somewhere around Guelph in Canada or thereabouts (Evan DeLaY said they were his neighbors), and the pic is 2.9 megs, so it isn't fast.

All the car windows are foggy. The carpets are soaked. We didn't even try to start the corolla. Used Verizon's phone directory (two tomes of 1500 pages each) to soak as much water as I could. Open it anywhere, lay flat on the floor, when the pages get soggy, tear them and throw into garbage, repeat with dry pages. It would use perhaps a dozen sheets per round. Verizon is blacklisted for me, can't see them after the experience 2003-2004. And they ran an optical cable under our patio without even asking for a permission. The workers didn't have a clue, didn't even speak english, being Mexicans all.

In Nina's car, a little plant sprouted from under the right seat. (... 12 words...)

On UA

>>http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355644,00.asp ...dead-end investments. Remember WebTV?, m$-Bob? m$ Home? m$at Work? FoxPro? m$ Money?

Do all those really belong together? :o)

Belong to whom?

(I never quite got around the concept that "to belong" doesn't necessarily imply ownership)

But, what Frank said - it was money M$ threw away without any serious intention to make money on it. The acquisition of Rushmore, and keeping up with the Joneses (A-T, then Borland) were tactical business moves, not a long-term investment that would bring profit in the future. Once it served the purpose (outclassed dBase IV, Rushmore extracted and retrofitted into SQL, ADO, Jet or wherever), came the morning after - a product with fundamentalist disobedient believers which maybe sells more Windows and SQL and is a pet of certain military and govemmental important customers, but... do we really need to be seen with it in public?

(... 25 words...)

And just a day after, more worries to share on the blogue:

Why does Facebook want to know? Catch-22.

I have to confess to a bit of vanity - six months ago, I added counters here and on my regular website, which I won't link to from here - that thing over there is my alter ego, which I'd like to keep separate.

statcounter.prg provides a nice service - I get decent statistics, albeit short-term, just last 500 visits, but that's OK. I'm not aiming to become a slashdot or a porn site. The few people that read this are quite enough - more than I'd reach by shouting off a soapbox (which I never saw - I mean, a box where they'd pack soaps, strong enough that you can stand on? No such thing).

As any good counter app (fuck English - it's not "counter" as in "counter-", it's "counter" as in "the one that counts does the counting"), it gives the referring link. From time to time, I see that people come to me from various fora, and I usually follow them upstream, just to see where they came from, who posted a link to me.

I can see most of it, except on Facebook, because it requires a login. Which I didn't have, so far. To me, it's outright Big Brother - the amount of personal info that can be traced via Facebook. And guess what, when I created a login there (under an assumed name, fake DOB, just my email was sort of real), it found somehow a lot of people I really am related to. I guess the email did it - it's my gmail account, which can then be derived from this blog's address and vice versa, which may mean that some of these people have at some point mentioned my email or this blog, or were related to those who did.

But... there was a nice catch-22 when creating the account. The Facebook wants my DOB. For whichever reason... well, I want to know why. Ah, there's a link right next to it: "why do we want to know this". Click on it - and voila, a login form in a new tab! And it says "you cannot see this info before you login". So... you have to supply a DOB in order to create an account, log in, and then see why did they want your DOB. Which they wanted to explain before you create the account, but wouldn't show you the explanation until you do...

Well, never mind that, I faked the date (you won't tell me why, I won't tell you what) and went back to "create new account" to now finally read that. Well, no, now it detects my cookies and gets me right in. I tried searching it for "why date of birth" and got a few pages about celebrities and other irrelevant nonsense (which isn't a pleonasm - some nonsense can be relevant).

They also insisted on formatting my name - and they seem to insist on having real names in there. Well, sorry about that, but you aren't getting that from me. I am the virtual person I seem to be. And another one on my old website, and at least three more in various fora. One of them should be better than me.

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Mentions: blogue, David Berton, Jan Brenkelen, Majkrosoft (m$), Nevena Sredljević (Nina), statcounter.prg, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian

25-IX-2020 - 8-IV-2026