Life's Little Problems
I seriously doubt anyone is particularly interested on the little issues I face, e.g., in publishing a daily blog post. A lot of what I've done in professional IT over the past 25 years involves working with an operating system called Unix and its more recent cousin called Linux. I've been quite skillful at developing scripts or custom programs/utilities to configure alerts, like email notifications, for all sorts of things (say, the need for more storage space in my database, filter a log for error messages, or schedule a backup). Naturally, I liked to manage my own personal computing resources for similar purposes. I initially licensed an expensive tool like MKS Toolkit to provide a Unix-like environment for working with Microsoft Windows. (Windows has its own batch/command files and its upgraded powershell capabilities, but I don't want this writeup to get too wonky and complex). I can write adeptly in a number of Unix/Linux shell scripting flavors, including Bourne, C, Korn, bash, etc., plus enough sed, awk, etc., to get by and do what I want. It's difficult to give typical examples, but maybe I want to categorize some downloaded files by unique filenames and/or timestamps. At some point, I migrated from my expensive MKS software to a freeware Unix-like distribution cygwin (which is supported to the current day). And then Windows provided a native interface for an Ubuntu distribution (a flavor of Linux).
So let me give a practical example of how I use this stuff. In my daily miscellany posts, I always regularly feature a signature quote of the day. And I've amassed thousands of quotes in text files. I think I've discussed one freeware utility, Qliner Quotes in my SoftDoc blog and technically is still installed but for technical reasons I no longer routinely use. One of the reasons I used it was it provided some support for including randomly chosen quotations for email signatures for Thunderbird, a freeware email product. In the past I had some odd little hobbies like recording unique daily messages for my answering machines (now that's old school). I had some talents like voice imitations and the like, and believe it or not, some of my friends would call me up just to listen to my entertaining messages. I remember one or 2 occasions my friends told me to hang up and not answer the phone so they could hear my message of the day.
My email signature didn't have the amusing vocal impressions but it was analogous in context. And I've had a lot of people over the years, especially IT recruiters, who became obsessed with my randomly selected quotes (thousands over the years) and even occasional requests for my quote files. As my signature daily newspaper-like format evolved, I decided on regular features like a daily quote, cartoon and music video, and I developed a utility which I used to select random quotes for the blog and emails.
For some reason, my Ubuntu/bash setup has stopped working recently, and I really didn't want to spend time troubleshooting the issue. So I quickly downloaded the latest release of cygwin and adapted my bash script accordingly, It still takes a few seconds to manually refresh my quote. I've got other issues that I'm dealing with like a particular Microsoft patch that doesn't seem to want to install and some sort of search engine hijacking issue which I think may have been seeded by a freeware product I've since deinstalled.
It's amusing; I remember being a young pup, before the age of 30, going through my rigorous PhD program and all 3 doctoral qualifying exams, thinking I was finally finished with the drudgery of taking university classes and tests; I would be the one giving tests. Yeah, right; was I ever that naive? Yeah, I suppose I could pursue a fifth college degree. It reminds me of John Lennon's infamous quote around the time of "Get Back": "I hope we passed the audition." As if the greatest musical performers in history had to prove themselves. They were competing against their own legend.
Bath Towels at Walmart
It often amuses me when I find myself not finding something at Walmart, something I know it carries, in abundance, but it seems like they're constantly reorganizing stuff. Or it's organized in what I consider an illogical way. Let me give a simple example to make the point. I once needed to pick up a ream of office paper. Think you would find any in their printer section, like say printer cartridges? Nope. Maybe in an office supply section aisles away. (Maybe that's changed since I last checked.) I remember on another occasion I was looking for a replacement bath scale. Think you might find them in a section with bathroom supplies? Nope. They were in a home improvement section, near things like water filtering supplies.
I remember some time back running into hundreds of bath towels in a dedicated section when I really wasn't looking for them. Long story short, it was time for me to replace some worn-out towels--and I couldn't figure out what happened to their aisles of towels. I did find some displays of beach towels on sale (as we head into autumn). I was determined to find them without asking an employee, and I eventually ran into a couple of dozen in a different section of the store. It could be they stocked them in multiple sections, and I somehow overlooked their major supply. I just don't understand their logic. For example, you can find K-cups for sale in their coffeemaker section as well as their grocery coffee section. But these things aren't consistent/predictable.
Don't ask me why; maybe it's my Howdy Doody face or they think I look like the Pillsbury Doughboy.. But more people ask me where to find something than some Walmart associates. Dumb stuff like "where are the hot dog buns?". I'm sorely tempted to ask them, "Did you try the bread aisle?" I'm a low-carber; I don't recall the last time I bought a hotdog or hamburger bun. I'll usually substitute something like a slice of whole wheat bread. Still, I try to be nice and tell them the bread aisle is next to the frozen food section. And I'll sometimes go there myself just to double-check what I was telling them.
Lockdown Diary
I just mentioned Walmart, but the most obvious change in my last trip was their long wrap-around line to the store entrance was FINALLY gone for about the first time in 6 months. I didn't mind so much the extra exercise of the Kubuki dance, but on a few occasions they had no carts in stock and you had to go back to the parking lot, fish one out and go the long way back.
I knew that the media would be obsessed with the 200K COVID-19 milestone and nearly 6M cases reported nationwide, I continue to focus on shorter-term trends, like this sample from Washpo:
New daily reported cases rose 12%
New daily reported deaths rose 31.6%
Covid-related hospitalizations fell 2.6% Read more
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 5.4%.
The number of tests reported rose 21.8% from the previous week.
This sounds worse than it is. For example they recently recorded around a 2700-death cumulative spike out of NY. We are seeing sub-1000 death and sub-50,000 case days. The positivity rate is a little higher than I would like, but not bad. My brother's sister-in-law, with serious health issues in Texas, was tested 4 times recently with negative results. And, of course, you can't ignore incidental outbreaks, notably recently on the Notre Dame football team.
Autumn Equinox
I originally joined my high school choir for the half-credit or so which helped me graduate a year early. This song, sung beautifully by one of my folks' favorite singers, was featured in our first performance.
