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Hurricane Florence PSA for My Friends and Family

EDIT 9/14/2018: Even though the storm’s winds weakened, the water – surge and rainfall – was always the primary threat. It still still is a very serious threat and will be for several days after landfall. Please continue to take this storm very seriously.

NC & SC FOLKS: Please read and share this! It’s not the same old yada-yada. Please prepare now for Florence and know where you are going if you have to evacuate in a hurry. This is going to be like nothing NC & SC have seen in recorded history. Seriously.
Hurricane Florence May be the Strongest U.S. Landfall on Record so Far North
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Yes, I know y’all know a hurricane is coming, and yes, I know y’all have lived through other hurricanes. So have I. I grew up there, too. I get it.
This is different. Florence is going to be huge and powerful (at least Saffir-Simpson category 3, meaning sustained winds well over 100 mph, with much higher gusts). The rainfall is the real threat, though, and Florence is perfectly set up to be like Harvey: swoop in, bring a lot of tropical moisture, stall near the coast, and drown everything. Even the rainfall forecasts are eerily similar to what we were seeing in Houston as Harvey got close.
Y’all are looking at 10+ inches of rain in 7 days over the entire eastern half of NC, and 20+ inches in places. That will flood pretty much everything, everywhere, just like it did with Harvey here in Houston.
Key Messages for Hurricane Florence
Please take this seriously. Have supplies (water, food, medicine, batteries, gasoline, etc.) on hand; you know the drill. But just as importantly: have an ESCAPE ROUTE. Know where you will go if you have to evacuate, and know that BEFORE the rain starts falling. Know where the 100- and 500-year floodplains are near you. Know where the creeks and rivers are.
Don’t forget to get valuables off the floor and as high as possible. Pull together important papers. Assume you’re going to have to leave everything behind on literally a minute’s notice. I know a lot of people who lived in places that “never flood,” outside the 500-year floodplains, who had to abandon their homes in a matter of minutes during Harvey as the waters came in. This is not a hypothetical scenario; it really can happen to you.
Florence Versus Size of the Carolinas
Again, I know y’all know this, but I love y’all, so I’m saying it anyway. You can’t overprepare for something on this magnitude. Please stay safe and check in regularly.
More on the Florence/Harvey parallels: Hurricane Florence could be a lot like Harvey. Here’s why.
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Your Smartphone or Your Life

Everyone: please be safe on the road. Whatever you need to read or look at on a phone can wait. It’s not worth dying for.
A few things I’ve seen in the last 24 hours:
A young man riding a bike and reading a piece of paper, with no hands on the handlebars. He was so focused on the paper that he wasn’t looking at the road at all, ran a stop sign, and turned directly into oncoming traffic, where he nearly got hit by a car. He never looked up, even when the car swerved around him, but just kept riding down the wrong side of the road.
A guy driving a car, using both hands to hold a book instead of the wheel, and looking down at the book in his lap, all while driving at full speed down one of the busiest streets in Houston during rush hour.
Multiple people running stop signs in my neighborhood at full speed, while all around children were walking to and from school.
A lady driving down one of those same neighborhood streets, holding her phone directly in front of her face… with small children in the back seat.
A story about a young lady who tried to “go live” on a streaming video service while driving. It cost her life and the lives of everyone else in her car.
Please drive when you’re driving. Read, text, tweet, “go live,” or play games later. Whatever else is going on in your life, it’s not so important that you need to jeopardize your life or the lives of your children and neighbors.
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Free Website Security Certificates (a/k/a Free SSL Certificates)

If you have a website, you almost certainly need to secure it. Even for a simple WordPress blog like this one, security is a real problem; sites get hacked all the time, and even a site like this one can draw hundreds or thousands of hack attempts per day. Sometimes, it’s because hackers discover a new vulnerability. Usually, it’s an old one that just hasn’t been patched yet. But there’s more: hackers can steal your login info and take over your site just by monitoring your traffic over a wireless network, like in a typical coffee shop or airport.

The solution for this is to get a security certificate (commonly, but no longer correctly, known as an SSL certificate). Typically, these cost $100/year or more, depending on what you need. But there’s good news.

The free option for today is StartSSL.com, which will give you a very basic certificate for free. It still requires some technical know-how, but not much; whoever handles your website maintenance now should be able to handle it pretty easily.

It’s about to get a lot easier. In mid-2015, Let’s Encrypt is launching. Let’s Encrypt is a project of the Internet Security Research Group, which consists of some real heavy-hitters in the tech world: Mozilla, Akamai, Cisco, the EFF, and IdenTrust. It will allow you do secure a website with, basically, one click. For free.

So, cost is no longer a barrier to securing your website. Go do it!

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Loneliest Human

The xkcd “What if?” blog has a great analysis of the people most eligible for the title of Loneliest Human. Not that I ever thought I had even come close, but it makes my whole “6 miles from the nearest light bulb” (at Philmont Scout Ranch) thing seem way less impressive.