I’m writing this Monday night after Irma came visiting. First off, thanks to the many people who wrote—either directly or through Disqus—to send their well wishes. I appreciate your concern and good thoughts.
At the last moment, Irma shifted east onto the mainland and went up the middle of the Florida peninsula rather than up the west coast. For those of you not as intimately familiar with hurricanes as we in Florida are, that’s important because hurricanes are basically heat pumps (technically a Carnot heat engine) and once over land they lose access to the warm coastal waters that are their source of energy. The result for Tampa was a routine Category 1 or 2 hurricane rather than the devastating monster storm that Irma was promising to be.
We did lose power Sunday night and it still hasn’t been restored. Once it is, I will publish this post. I could, I suppose, connect to WordPress with my iPad and write the post directly into the control panel but once you’ve experienced the joy of writing and publishing your blog posts from Emacs, you never want to do that.
Florida officialdom is actually pretty good at dealing with these things so I expect you’ll be seeing this post soon.