A couple hours more of this snowfall, then it’s wind gusts and back to springtime warmth. Already the sun is beaming through the pallid atmosphere and wintry flakes. The white upholstered landscape is remarkably beautiful. The sight of the river is almost entirely muted by the snowfall and humid sky. The deck chairs – upon which only hours ago I languished in the sunshine – are now like snowmen, serenely bound by soft but ample cuffs of white.

I had a horrid overnight sleep.  Shamefully I spent until midnight last evening on TikTok watching repeated and varied political disparagement of Trump. Once you get into that vernacular, the algorithms perpetuate it endlessly. It surprised me to uncover numerous articles devoted to education of the public; matters such as economic policy, historical details, political data and the like. Increasingly the platform is being used by adults not children; the model has progressively advanced from entertainment to communication, much the way historically computers graduated from Pac-Man to WordPerfect.

Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and published by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturingas part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called “Power Pellets” causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.

The original arcade system board had one Z80A processor, running at 3.072 MHz, 16 kbyte of ROM and 3 kbyte of static RAM. Of those 1 kbyte each was for video RAM, color RAM and generic program RAM. There were two custom chips on the board: the 285 sync bus controller and the 284 video RAM addresser, but daughterboards made only from standard parts were also widely used instead. Video output was (analog) component video with composite sync. A further 8 kbyte of character ROM was used for characters, background tiles and sprites and an additional 1 kbit of static RAM was used to hold 4bpp sprite data for one scanline and was written to during the horizontal blanking period preceding each line. Sprite size was always 16×16 pixels, one of the four colors per pixel was for transparency (of the background).

The snowstorm has kept me confined to the apartment. Car wash today is absurd, quite apart from the driving perils in slush and salt. I have reluctantly submitted to Nature. Meanwhile as an accommodation of my impatience – and addressing the necessity of at least some exercise even for an old fogey – I walked along the corridor. My arthritic ribs and neuropathic limbs prevented me from attaining Olympic standard. I must await arrival of my new electric tricycle – and the evaporation of the snow – before I can do anything more adventurous than circulating within the subterranean garage.