Shutdown Diary
My Navy buddy Bill, currently retired in central Florida, has run into all sorts of issues trying to get him and his wife vaccinated and so clipped the following cartoon onto Facebook:
Courtesy of the original artist via Facebook
According to Washpo, the numbers are heading in the right direction. A rough look at the 43 M doses administered number implies about 10% of the population has been at least partially vaccinated. Not nearly enough, of course, to reach herd immunity. (I myself have preregistered as in an at risk group, but I suspect there's a long queue ahead of me: "XXX County still has over 10,000 people over 75 waiting for a first dose. The state allocation to the health department is enough to vaccinate 1,000 with a first dose, per week." I'm not in the 75+/other group.)
In the past week in the U.S....
New daily reported cases fell 23.2%
New daily reported deaths fell 12.3%
Covid-related hospitalizations fell 13.7%
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 6.9%.
The number of tests reported fell 12.3% from the previous week.
Since Dec. 14, more than 43,024,000 doses of a covid-19 vaccine have been administered in the U.S.
More than 9,756,000 people have completed vaccination, or about 2.99% of the population
We are still seeing resistance to a First Dose First approach. From my county: "The current vaccines are only authorized by the FDA to be given as two doses and it would violate the authorization to repurpose second doses to give more first doses." Alex Tabarrock of Marginal Revolution has published extensively on this approach, which I wholeheartedly agree:
Clash of the Alma Maters
Sometimes you run into sports competitions between schools where you've graduated. I hold degrees from 3 universities (Our Lady of the Lake, the University of Texas, and the University of Houston). UH brutally ended a long UT home football game win streak while I was earning my first Master's. Little did I know or expect I would be earned my two graduate business degrees, including a PhD in MIS, at UH a decade later. My middle brother got his chemical engineering degree from UT a couple of years later, and in fact I invited him as my guest when I was at UH to visiting Texas games. Of course, for several years since my being a student, UH had joined the now defunct Southwest Conference with UT. (The bigger rivalry for Texas was A&M, typically over Thanksgiving. Texas and A&M migrated to the now Big 12 after the demise of the Southwest conference Then about a decade ago, A&M left for the more lucrative SEC conference. To show the competition, my third sister has 3 sons who have graduated at least once from A&M, and two of her other 3 kids hold UT degrees.)
When I attended OLL, I don't think it had any collegiate sports team. I was racking my brain trying to remember when I first ran across its mention. (Obviously in the decades since I graduated, I haven't kept touch. In fact, I've never been to any reunion (high school or above or a return visit after graduation, maybe my brother's graduation or an occasional UT football game. There are personal reasons which I won't discuss here, but to give an example UT wasn't helpful when a job fell through after graduation (I got thrown out of the placement center because I was no longer registered, and when I tried to go back to pick up high school teaching credentials, I needed a copy of my family's financial statement, technically because they had listed me as a dependent although never contributing a dime to my college expenses, including room and board. My folks thought two degrees were enough, and they felt a moral obligation to stop me from being a "professional student". I needed a financial package; that required filing a statement, which was already on file for my brother. And the goddamn UT bureaucrat said using my brother's FFS on file would "violate his data privacy". At that point, Austin was still mostly a small college town with anti-growth quality of life initiatives, I didn't have a car, and my job prospects were marginal in a bad economy. It's funny to think what would have happened if I had become a high school math teacher, oddly enough my initial intent attending OLL. I did end up getting a job interview invitation from Austin Community College late that year after I had accepted an offer from the US Navy.)
I remember stumbling across a column or Youtube video (cf below) and I was trying to remember it was; thank God for PC search tools. The unranked OLL Saints beat a top-ranked, undefeated LSU-Shreveport on a last-second 3-pointer almost 10 years back.
So imagine my surprise when I on my cellphone read nationally ranked NCAA UH was hosting OLL. I knew this wasn't going to end well for the Saints. I think they had only 1 player over 6'4" vs 4 for UH. Now height isn't everything, but as I learned when I went out for eighth grade basketball, you can't teach height. In fact, my first college roommate was 6'7"; imagine being nearly a foot shorter than your roommate, as if I weren't already insecure enough about my height given a general female height preference. (He soon left and eventually dropped out with his 6 foot tall gorgeous blonde girlfriend.) Now recall that I've been a rabid Cougars fan since attending during the days of Phi Slama Jama. It's been a while since UH has had a nationally ranked team. Yeah, no Shreveport finish here: 112-46.
So On My Computing Hobby...
I have a practical computing blog; I like to look especially at usability issues. So, to give a taste of what I've dealt with lately, including recent or possible future topics:
- For some reason, my backlog of hundreds of Tom Woods podcasts just disappeared. I'm not sure if it's an iTunes bug, some bizarre bug with my cloud backup software, or some other quirk. I had some quirk back around October or November which affected all folders, not just Woods. Now I'll delete podcasts after I listen to them, but I haven't binged on Woods recently. More recently I'll embed maybe up to 3 a week of his videos in my miscellany posts depending on topic. Now I'm a fanatic about backups so I quickly was able to restore the tracks in an hour or two.
- In an analogous freakish issue, my backlog of Good Morning Liberty episodes just duplicated, e.g., podcast.mp3, podcast 1.mp3. About 13 GB's of duplicates. Thank God for cygwin (a Unix emulator.
- Google Play Music decided to close shop, and I've already transferred to Youtube Music. But there was an option for me to download my music (including various albums I've purchased digitally, including Kelly Clarkson's Greatest Hits. So I've folded these tracks into my iTunes music download library. Fun, fun, fun.
- I use Mailstore Home, free for personal use (compatible with Outlook and Thunderbird). I use my mail program as a filtering mechanism and stage my backlogs and must-keep (family, bill/payments, send log, etc.) to Mailstore. I've probably got up to 10 GB of old emails. So one day I go to start up Mailstore and it refuses to come up complaining about invalid key files. No quick solution via Google or the vendor. I finally go to the file system and notice a couple of files with "key" file extensions. I figured maybe they got corrupted, went to a recent backup (ever the DBA), copied over the two files--and presto, Mailstore came up.
- My cloud backup syncing software for some reason about a week ago. So I've twice reinstalled the client and it's finally working, just caught up (including my music library additions) as I've written the post.
- I lost my work computer job schedule (without my own backup) because of a single keystroke typo.
- iTunes maddeningly incoherent handling of playlists. So to provide the context I've basically transitioned computers to a newer PC with a bigger memory, more hard drive, faster chips, touchscreen, bluetooth, USB 3.0, etc. But among other things, my old playlists weren't available. Now you might think I could do something like right-click on a playlist and select export. Nope. First, you need to select a playlist on the main screen (and ensure you have at least one tune in your playlist; otherwise you don't get an export option; that sounds obvious, unless you're trying to give general instructions), then go to File/Library/Export Playlist (and choose extension XML). Then you go to your target iTunes and go to File/Library/Import Playlist. (If it can't find a tune on your playlist, it'll alert you.) But to give another counterintuitive thing, what if you want to rename a playlist (sometimes you want to add and let the name default to playlist 2, etc.) Think you can click on playlist 2 and rename it or right-click, select rename. No, you need to display Playlist 2 and click into the title in the top left corner.
- In a future post, I'll talk about how I finally got Windows Your Phone to connect to my Android smartphone. It's supposed to be easy, but let me give a hint. A failed installation can affect a reinstall.
- I go on indefinitely but I'll end up this list with something that surfaced when I brought up iTunes to ensure my descriptions above were valid. My long song list was gone. So were a half dozen or so playlists I just imported a few days. Now the cigar goes to whoever guesses right; I groaned because I instantly knew. No, music tracks didn't go away. But the guts behind iTunes is its logical library, iTunes Library.itl. And I knew what it had to be. Sure enough, iTunes Library (damaged).itl was nearly 6 MB. The new itl file: <3 MB. No big deal: I can recatalog files, import old xml files, etc. But what would a DBA do? Hint: I've mentioned it above.
