Shutdown Diary
There's no way to understate the tragedy we have been seeing lately. Here are the latest numbers from Washpo:
New daily reported cases rose 14.3%
New daily reported deaths rose 19.2%
Covid-related hospitalizations rose 5.7% Read more
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 13.6%.
The number of tests reported rose 13.8% from the previous week.
Since Dec. 14, more than 7,263,000 doses of a covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the U.S.
From my personal experience, I don't know if it's because I'm getting older--but twice recently I've had to ask people (including a doctor) to speak up because I couldn't hear them clearly through their masks. It may not just be me, though; when I went to Walmart to pick up a prescription (you know, they ask for PII like DOB), they couldn't find my prescription; it turned out she misheard the year, making me 10 years younger.
COVID-19 vaccination policies are stupid. I've tweeted about it recently. I have an older relative in assisted living. That facility has had multiple incidents of staff and resident infection, including one resident who apparently died from complications. Yet her grandson, in his 20's, got his vaccination before she finally did, Friday. The grandson is a meteorologist, considered an "essential worker" in Texas getting priority. But in Texas, you qualify at 65. In some states, like New York, Nursing Home Killer Cuomo has only recently given the green light at 75 and above. In fact, NY has been going after providers who have not been adhering to Cuomo's schemes, threatening, among other things, confiscation of their vaccine supply. The context is similar to this: say, a vial of vaccine contains (say) 10 doses. So efficient distribution requires at least 10 recipients. The logistics problem has been finding enough eligible recipients to ensure perishable residual doses aren't wasted. So the end result is about 54% of vaccines in NY have gone undistributed. (Note that there is some anti-vaxxer resistance, up to 15% in some target groups.) So far over 6.6 million (initial) doses have been administered nationally, with Texas leading the way with over 700K.
The novel coronavirus has hit multiple branches of my extended family tree, most recently including a sister-in-law's brother's family. (The brother is hospitalized, and his daughter is having to recuperate at home, due to hospital capacity; thank God her fever broke.) I previously mentioned it's affected my oldest nephew and niece's families and another niece's spouse as well. One of the major issues I have with lockdown policies is the statistics I've seen show some 70-odd% of infections occur in the home, not, say, outdoor dining facilities (you can't rule out infection, e.g., downwind from an infected person, but the risk is smaller than being indoors where bioaerosols concentrate and recirculate).
Another note I've commented about on Twitter. Postal delivery has been ridiculous lately. My youngest sister finally got her Christmas card from me yesterday. Yes, it was postmarked before Christmas. A sister-in-law, also in Texas, joked that the workers walking letters from Baltimore have got to pick up their pace. Snow, sleet, etc., the USPS can handle. But COVID-19 staffing? I wonder if Trump ballots by mail are just getting delivered in Georgia (I'm messing with Trumpkin heads....)
Dreams
I do have my fair share of weird dreams. In the latest, it's like I'm in an oral exam for admission to some health science program. It included some question about comets. What the hell? Maybe some general science literacy question.
Software Usability
I'm still running into nagging issues transferring from my older laptop computer to a newer one. I'll probably keep my Microsoft Office licenses on the older one. Now even though I use a program launcher (Quick Cliq), I tend to like to load the taskbar as well as to make visible most of the icons on the system tray. You quickly run out of space on the bottom of your screen. Now the taskbar itself wasn't so bad; it would simply fold over. Usually that was a nuisance, especially when top-layer icons, say Chrome, Thunderbird or iTunes might disappear during an upgrade; I never found it easy to drag and drop a replacement icon back to the top level. At some point I stumbled across the fact I could drag the taskbar up ro accommodate multiple layer display. I could then more easily rearrange program icons and collapse the taskbar back to a single layer.
What wasn't obvious to me is that folding behavior doesn't apply to the system tray--at least in accessibility. It was annoying me in the sense the time/date/calendar button and action center icon were scrolling off screen. Long story short, I discovered that those icons reappeared if and when I dragged the taskbar to 2 or more levels.
Entertainment
I had recently purchased a DVD player PC/TV compatible. I recently mentioned purchasing a copy of a Hallmark Channel cable movie classic "Christmas Magic" (about an event planner involved in a horrible car accident who is sent on a Christmas angel mission to deal with a restaurant manager widower and his young daughter; it spawned one of my favorite songs "Angel Like You".) I knew my low-end flat TV had a USB port; I really don't buy that many DVD movies. When I do play them, I normally run them off my PC's, although a couple of notebook PC's don't have DVD drives. And it turns out, although the TV could see the disk, it couldn't really mount the movie. So THAT's what they mean by incompatible content...
/I then tried to mount it on my newer workhorse PC (no DVD player) and was relieved to see the VLC software installed could mount the movie.
As a DBA I always like redundancy. This includes things like remotes (I recently bought one for my TV from Amazon for under $10). I'll occasionally misplace my cable remote (yes, I have a Tile on it, and I think I could also get a replacement on Amazon for a similar price as my TV remote). What I didn't realize is that my cable provider has a remote app for my smartphone where I can easily change channels on the TV with a couple of clicks.
On WWE, both (RAW and Smackdown) champion tag teams have recently rotated to heels, but the most interesting storyline is a long overdue babyface turn for Nakamura in an obvious feud with Roman Reigns. They did push an interesting babyface challenge of Apollo Crews, who I think is the most acrobatic wrestler I've seen with new babyface Intercontinental champion Big E.
