05 December 2023
================

Well... i think winter is really here to stay, last night we got 
about 10 cm fresh snow whithout any indication of melting in
sight. Not bad for beginning of december, the last time i can
remember a situation like this was when i was a kid in the 80s.
Somehow everything is feeling a bit like a rerun of the 80s for 
me: The obvious thing with the new east / west conflict doesn't
need any explanation i think, the brewing conflicts in south
america neither... but a more personal thing that gave me real
flashbacks is this: Until the mid 90s the german post did reside
in a brutalist "bunker" style building here in my hometown, until
they moved away into a more modern, more city centre oriented
building. Now... this new(er) building will now be broken down
and they moved back into that old concrete castle. The only shame
is, that they did not put back the telephone booth in front of
it.

Regarding my tinkering with the BMC64 i found a gutted C64C case
with keyboard for a very, very reasonable price on ebay and
hope it will arrive this week. The cool thing with the BMC64 is,
that you can wire up the real joystick ports (just DB9 connectors)
and the original C64 keyboard to the GPIO pins of the Raspberry
making it into a nearly complete C64 (though, printer port is
missing and no way to connect a real disk drive). My ultimate
goal would be to pĂut an Ultimate64 mainboard into it, but this is
some project for the future...

What i also grew increasingly fond of is BASIC. Yeah, i know, it
has a somewhat bad reputation and is often leading to the 
creating of "spaghetti code", but on the other hand i have seen
"spaghetti code" written in nearly every language. What i really
like about it (now more than 25 years after leaving it behind) is
the nearly LISP like workflow (yeah, heresy i know) you can 
achieve with it. I mean... what is the build in BASIC other than
a REPL? Even my wife who absolutely has no nostalgic feelings 
regarding the 8-Bit era was tempted to try a few things (after 
making some snarky remarks on my newest "pile of electronic junk"
on my desktop) and liked the ease in which you can put together
some small tools.

Well... now its time to work back at my day job, i need to 
finish another long overdue project and help some collegues with
"assisted clicking" on tasks they do for years now but seemingly
forget how to do them just the moment the task is done.