Yes, I'm Partly COVID-19 Vaccinated
I'm not happy with how the State of Maryland is handling distributions. I preregistered in my county. around Jan. 25 for my risk group, and the county is still backlogged with vaccinating the 75+ risk group through the end of the month. Governor Hogan (R) has supposedly diverted significant supply to mass vaccination sites like Six Flag, and apparently some supplies are going to drugstores, etc., something I wasn't even aware of. My younger, oldest sister went that route in Ohio, realizing, too, she was facing a long wait going through local government. This kind of garbage just emphasizes the sheer gross incompetence of government in general, and yet many progressives want to nationalize healthcare. How anyone trusts the government after they fucked up release of initial COVID-19 testing, weeks behind other countries like Thailand, is beyond me, never mind Nursing Home Killer Cuomo.
I ended up getting an unsolicited email from the Johns Hopkins system (I have a lot of respect for this private, not-for-profit institution)/ I had an outpatient surgery a couple of years back in Baltimore, and I guess they determined I qualified for a shot under their limited supply constraints. That didn't mean I could find a more convenient location, like an outpatient facility I knew in Baltimore. They had a few locations towards DC, including Laurel and Bethesda, with open slots. basically hour-plus drives from home. I was actually modestly familiar with Laurel in Prince George's county. I had unsuccessfully applied for a temp DBA position there years back (to substitute for someone going on maternity leave). So mixed feelings about returning there. It turns out they had a minor assembly line operation for maybe 2-3 dozen people per half-hour slot. It was about as painless a bureaucratic operation as I've seen. I probably only had to wait maybe 15 minutes to get my shot once I was in the building. After the shot, they make you wait for another 15 minutes (I guess to ensure no immediate bad reactions). while they came around to schedule a follow-up shot in early April.
I had the Pfizer version (vs. Moderna or J&J). It was fairly painless, no real issues; I guess I'm fairly used to flu shots and blood work. The vaccinator told me it's usually the second shot dose when some people have some issues/side-effects. He noted I would be booked on a Friday, giving me the weekend to recoup if necessary.
I thought as the oldest of 7, I would be the first of the siblings vaccinated. Nope. Of course, I had 4 siblings by the time I was in first grade. It turns out my RN sister, I mentioned above, got her "one and done" J&J vaccine Monday at a drugstore. And she was the LAST in her family of 5 vaccinated. Her (younger) husband and two of her daughters are involved in teaching/coaching, and her other daughter is also an RN. I think I mentioned a while back one of my recently graduated meteorologist nephew, working for the National Weather Service, had qualified as an "essential worker" weeks back. My middle brother and sister-in-law volunteered as a vaccine site, and apparently they qualified from any leftover vaccine (perishable). And my baby brother and sister-in-law qualified under health condition exceptions. I feel bad about my second sister-in-law in particular because she's been battling stuff like lupus her whole life. She says her first shot took a couple of days to recover from.
Shutdown Digest
One of my clients over the past year has been a government agency. It's been interesting for a variety of reasons. One of them has been availability of remote work. It's long been technically possible for me to do my work as an Oracle DBA/IT consultant remotely; why haven't I? It's a good question; I have a coed friend from my freshman year in high school who was trying to convict me to retire early and/or just move to Texas and work remotely like one of her other geek friends. In most cases, there were security policies in play, and government manager/clients have been risk-averse, especially if you have potential access to privileged data. There are also managerial control and preferences and relational aspects at play (interpersonal relationships, work teams and meetings). Perhaps it seems obvious in a world where web conferencing and video calling are commonplace.
But back around 2002, I subcontracted at a Chicago city agency, commuting by Metra from the NW suburbs. I think the last train out/in was around 6 PM. So I get a call after 10 PM about an issue my first week, which required about 5 minutes of busywork. I had to drive about 40 minutes into downtown, find a place to park, and go through building security, requiring an escort. When I worked for IBM in the DC VA suburbs, I was remotely serving clients in Florida, Minnesota and the West Coast, not to mention participating in a project in Europe. I worked for a university software vender (now under a different name), doing a number of installations and training on an operational data store product (think of it as a bridge between a production database and a data warehouse). Clients would be normally billed for our travel expenses, and my employer offered them the option of having us work remotely and saving the travel costs. I had only 1 client I recall accepting that option, a small private college in Kansas, ironically one of my nephews was attending.
But in reality in over two decades in my DBA career, I've rarely had physical access to the servers I've been working on. In fact, when one of my servers had a defective disk a couple of years back, Oracle wouldn't send out a field engineer to replace it; I had to do it (not difficult--it was a hot swappable cartridge, but you had better ensure you replaced the right cartridge; I hadn't even seen my servers before and I had to have an escort into the facility.
For a while in the current gig, I had transitioned to working in person one day a week but rising rates soon put an end to the transition. But given the recent/ongoing decline of the wave, it would not surprise me to see us going back to a transitional period soon. Management is clear that their goal is to return to in-person work at the facility; some people have been doing so for some time now, even with the wave, e.g., desktop operations patching hardware issues (in my area of the workforce). I have noticed a couple of nuances since the start of the Biden Administration, although it may have been planned earlier. First, they are worried about past COVID-19 infected individuals not being accepted back in the workplace. Second, they have become fairly zealous over masking on federal property, including outside buildings, regardless of social distancing, even driving on the property. I'm pretty anal-retentive about following mask policy, even when there's negligible risk of a few people leaving the building infecting others outside, and particularly within your car if you're driving solo. My guess is they don't want to enforce complicated rules: it's just easier to enforce a uniform rule.
Some Minor Notes
I sometimes amuse myself by not noticing some obvious things. During recent car maintenance, they had changed my dashboard settings. I really haven't tried to experiment with dashboard settings, but I was particularly annoyed to find my odometer and mpg displays had disappeared. I could only see the odometer when I turned off the engine. I finally started reading my car manual. Amazingly, I couldn't find a Youtube video on this. Lots of stuff on earlier models where I think they embedded a trip button in a some steering wheel display buttons. Apparently the trip button could toggle through several settings like Trip A, Trip B, etc., and one option lists the odometer. So the car manual mentions a Trip button. (It might have helped if they mentioned the location of the button. Not from what I read.) So I was looking at the two display clusters on the steering wheel and I don't see a Trip button. And then one day, when I wasn't looking for it, I noticed a standalone Trip button southwest of the leftmost (audio) control cluster. I quickly pressed the Trip button a few times, and voila, my missing odometer/mpg reappeared.
My vaccine drive Tuesday was the first time using my EZPass transponder. Did I mount it correctly? So I had to drive through the Baltimore tunnel and I was worried whether it would work and wondered if I would have to argue with bureaucrats if I got invoiced for going through EZPass. I haven't used a transponder in years and could swear the transponder would ding or something when the toll was collected. Nope. But when I drove through a booth lane, I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw the monitor past the booth flash "PAID".
