Chernobyl

Chernobyl nuclear power station

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Love & Death - Netflix Series

Love & Death | Official Trailer | Warner Bros. Entertainment
Warner Bros. Entertainment

We only watched the first couple of episodes and then we had had enough of these people. I'm only posting this because I laid all the ground work when we started watching it and I'm cleaning out my drafts folder.

 

Love & Death is a 7-episode true-crime drama miniseries, now streaming on Netflix as of December 2025, that chronicles the 1980 killing of Betty Gore by Candy Montgomery in Texas. Starring Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons, the show follows a suburban affair that turns deadly, leading to a high-profile murder trial. - Google

Cast

Actor	Surname	Character	Surname	Role
Elizabeth	Olsen	Candy	Montgomery	Instigator
Jesse	Plemons	Allan	Gore	Candy's target
Lily	Rabe	Betty	Gore	Allan's wife
Patrick	Fugit	Pat	Montgomery	Candy's husband
Krysten	Ritter	Sherry	Cleckler	Candy's friend
Tom	Pelphrey	Don	Crowder	Candy's lawyer
Elizabeth	Marvel	Jackie	Ponder	Old pastor of the Methodist church
Keir	Gilchrist	Ron	Adams	New pastor

7 episodes, 55 minutes each.

Floppies

Floppies

Back in the early 1980's, at one my first computer jobs, I took on the task of configuring the Intel's iRMX86 Operating System for a custom Multibus computer system.

Intel Blue Box

We were using Intel Blue Boxes which we were renting from Intel for the princely sum of a thousand dollars a month. These machines had (3) eight inch floppy drives. Generating a version of the operating system entailed firing up a program and then loading a series of floppies and letting the program run. This took hours and inevitably there would be something wrong and the newly generated OS would not work, so I would change something and go through the process again.

Figure 2-7. Multibus Data Line Use

This went of for days. Finally we got an Intel consultant (Bruce Warmbrod) to pay us a visit. When we sat down to debug the problem, we discovered that one the of boards in the system, probably our own custom memory board, was not following Intel's Multibus byte-swapping protocol. That was both a Eureka moment and a Mount Vesuvius moment. What spawn of the devil had designed this memory board? Turned out we had stolen the design from the cheapest memory board we could find. Learned a lot about the computer business that day.

Drill, Baby, Drill

Bullwinkle jacket, Corpus Christi, Texas, 1988

Jacket is the underwater structure that supports the drilling platform.

Mick Jagger introduces The Beatles to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Mick Jagger introduces The Beatles to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Alejandro Suarez Basso

1988. Cool. Jagger would have been 45.