September 2005 Archives

Over the weekend I joined a bunch of other ST1300 owners, and met up near Yosemite for a weekend of fun. Read the recap of the ride from STPilot

.. and if so, do you have flood insurance?

From today's local Sacramento Bee, regarding Hurricane Katrina:

Homeowners insurance will cover the cost of household damage caused by Katrina's high winds and any related water damage as a result of the winds. But for homeowners whose loss is from flooding caused by levee breaches, they're covered only if they bought national flood insurance.

Hartwig said that in New Orleans, only about one in four homeowners had national flood insurance, coverage offered only by FEMA through policy riders sold by all insurance agents.

New Orleans is admittedly below sea level. The sea isn't what got them; their lake did. Sacramento is in a similiar position; much of our water (the rivers) is higher above ground than we are. Notice those levees around the rivers? Those are above the level of many of our houses.

According to SAFCA, Sacramento's flood protection is rated for 100 year floods now. (That is, there is a 1% chance any year of flooding now).
Bad news: New Orleans was rated for 250 year flood protection.

Despite the lifting of this flood insurance requirement, the potential for a flood disaster remains an unpredictable threat to public safety. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warns that over the life of a 30-year mortgage, property owners in areas like the American River floodplain can expect an approximately 26% chance of flooding.

Much of our land was recently declared to no longer required mandatory flood insurance. This does not mean cancel it! You can call and get a "Preferred Risk Policy" for about a third of the normal price. I believe I'm paying around $300 a year for mine.

• http://floodsmart.gov - Get information about flood insurance and risk
• http://www.msc.fema.gov/ordrinfo.shtml - Detailed flood risk maps. Windows viewer for downloads; otherwise order paper copies.
• http://www.safca.com SAFCA - Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency
• Prefered risk policy info for rezoned Sacramento area houses

Article replaced 9/5/05

One mailing list I'm on requires that all posts have a signature block; it even requires additional information not found in my normal signature. The problem is, I rarely remember to bother playing that game, especially after a big bulk delete of quoted material. So, my options were either one hell of a neurosurgeon to fix my memory issues, or to find a way to force outgoing mail, but only for that list, to forcefully have a specific signature block.

I use "pine" on unix, which I'm sure will elicit a crowd of laughter. Okay, done? So, pine does have the ability to send outbound messages through a filter. Normally, this is an optional step, and allows people to do things like set up GPG signatures on outbound mail. I'm using that hook to handle signatures.

#! /usr/local/bin/perl5

# PINE .pinerc:
#sending-filters=/home/jfesler/bin/sending-filter _TMPFILE_ _RECIPIENTS_

my $tmpfile = shift @ARGV;
die "Missing tmpfile"  unless (-f $tmpfile);
open(MESSAGE,">>$tmpfile");

if (scalar grep(/\@st1100.com/,@ARGV)) {
  addsig("/home/jfesler/.signature.stoc");
}

sub addsig {
 my($sig) = @_;
 unless(open(SIG,"<$sig")) {
   print STDERR "Missing $sig : $!";
   sleep 3;
   return;
 }
 print MESSAGE "-- \n";
 while(<SIG>) {
   print MESSAGE;
 }
 close SIG;
}

These do a few things; 1: they set up logging. 2: they match one specific destination, and if found, append a signature file (in this case, .signature.stoc) at the end. And, lastly, it outputs *only* the message body (not the header) to "stdout". Pine will do unhappy things if you output a header, so don't do that.