Shutdown Diary
According to Washpo
The uptick in new cases, hospitalizations, and test positivity are disappointing, but other than some worrisome concentrations, e.g., in Michigan, are well within our healthcare capacity. Remember about the angst over the chronic shortage of ventilators as the pandemic escalated; production ramped up by multiple hundred thousands but availability of skilled personnel can't keep up.
Probably the most annoying thing during the pandemic to me personally has been medical visits. I haven't even seen my personal physician in over a year. For whatever reason, the specialist I've been seeing over the past year or so has been alternating with a nurse-practitioner every 3 months. Not crazy about seeing a nurse-practitioner to begin with; I was supposed to see him Monday on my flex-day off when the office called me in the morning, my guess to remind me of the appointment. Nope. They said the nurse-practitioner for some reason wasn't at the office and wanted to convert the visit to a televisit. There are other reasons for not doing this, including a scheduled blood test. Plus I needed the more extensive blood lab test paperwork for my next "real" visit this summer. Long story short, I declined the televisit. They may have decided to drop me as a patient; I don't know. ,
I once had a doctor in Towson drop me for showing up 15 minutes late in bad traffic--even though he booked multiple patients at the same time.in different round robin rooms. I certainly despise Procrustean solutions for the convenience of staff. The last visit I had with this dude was a complete waste of my time. It was bad enough I had to go to see him on my day off; now I have to pay a high co-pay for his convenience? Maybe if I were actually sick. The visit I mentioned in Towson years back? He wanted an office visit to briefly go over bloodwork he could have given over the phone. The real problem? I had to put off an outpatient procedure for over 3 months because the surgeon refused to schedule me when she heard my doctor dropped me and I had to call the surgeon's office to find out when I didn't get promised paperwork the weekend before the planned surgery (it was a very painful condition, and I had to put up with intense pain on and off for maybe 5 months).
I'm a very capable IT professional, and my time is money. I've never treated my clients or students like that. In fact, I remember walking to UWM campus in knee-deep snow one day to deal with panicking students who had a computing assignment due that day.
Maybe the nurse-practitioner had a legitimate reason for not showing up at the office, and/or the doctor's office waiting until a couple of hours to try to talk me into converting the visit couldn't be helped. But the bloodwork was the prerequisite for having a discussion, which meant I would have to scramble to get that done before the televisit made sense. The doctors office seemed ill-prepared to deal with it.
So my antibody count should be up in the nearly 2 weeks since my second Pfizer shot; Pfizer indicates it expects at least 6 months of protection; I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of a booster later this year including more protection against newer variants.
My RN sister has taken the "one and done" J&J vaccine, so I asked her about the AstraZeneca-like blood clot kerfuffle on heavy news coverage. She points out it's been more than a month, no issues the issues have been with maybe a dozen out of 6 million vaccinated and it seemed to be clustered around women taking birth control (non-applicable).
It's good seeing more states now opening up vaccination for adults, say 16 and above. We need more people vaccinated to help build herd immunity.. As I write about a quarter are fully vaccinated and just over a third of Americans are at least partially vaccinated. Experts seem to think we need 70-90% to reach herd immunity.
Mick Jagger teams up with Dave Grohl in parodying anti-vaxxers:
The Tax Man
Familiar readers probably know I have a quirky relationship with new technology. I bought one of the first VCR's on the market and had a long history of answering machines, but I lagged in buying CD's vs vinyl records and I've owned a smartphone for less than 10 years. The rationale differed by technology For example, it really wasn't until I had unlimited talk minutes on an affordable cellphone plan that I transitioned off landline and later cable voice. I have an extensive vinyl collection, so what really forced my hand to start my CD collection was when I couldn't find new recordings on vinyl.
So why haven't I e-filed my returns yet? Well, initially you had to pay for the privilege. And I have some security-related concerns, not unlike for voting procedures. This doesn't mean I can't be convinced but I need to do my due diligence. I used to think of USPS as dependable but it took the USPS a month to deliver my Mom's birthday card (to Texas from Maryland). So they were in the mail Monday.
I'm amused over a kerfuffle with my baby sister, a CPA in Texas. I had pointed out I knew the IRS had given an extension but when I went to Maryland's tax portal, it specifically pointed out its tax forms were due in by April 15. I pointed out to my siblings I didn't see the logic of Maryland holding to the original deadline given the IRS' extension, since Maryland basically offsets adjusted federal gross income. So my sister sent me some blurb from a Maryland website citing a deferral. Am I surprised that the Democrat comptroller didn't propagate the deferral across all his webpages? Nope. But I've had enough experience dealing with government bureaucrats that I didn't want to explain why I overlooked the deadline in their main portal I got off Google.
I'm anal-retentive over protecting data privacy. One freeware software product I've used is Safehouse Explorer. (I don't know if the original vendor is still a going concern; they used to market a premium upgrade version, and I couldn't reach the vendor website this afternoon; the Explorer product can still be downloaded from a number of software portals.) The basic idea is that you can create a password-protected encrypted volume (say, 6 GB) which you can mount as a writeable virtual disk drive. So every year I'll store scanned copies of W-2's, saved filled tax forms, capital loss carryover worksheets, tax spreadsheets, instruction booklets, etc. And more recently I'll create pdf files of scanned signed tax forms I'm mailing in.
So, ever the DBA, I made backups of my tax files overnight, then scanned my federal and state forms before heading to the post office. Later I moved my files to my encrypted vault when my system hiccuped at the end of the process. Safehouse complained it couldn't open my vaults. Now I have multiple offline and cloud backups of my vaults so I could probably recover what preexisted to my latest archival plus I had my overnight backup, everything except my 2 scanned pdf's. Annoying but not a catastrophe. Luckily a reboot resolved my Safehouse issues, and I noticed with relief that the two pdfs did get archived before the software got hosed.
I do have archival copies of the Safehouse software but I get nervous when software is orphaned, no longer supported. That happened with a quotation signature product and a freeform database product I loved called AskSam.(which I used, for one thing, to store old emails). I devised a simple Unix shell script to functionally replace the quotation product and I use other software to warehouse my old emails. (You would be surprised how often I've had to fish out, say, a 7-year-old licensed software receipt or an old landlord's contact information, e.g., for government background checks). So I'll probably start using another encryption software product in the event, say, Safehouse Explorer doesn't work in a new version of Windows. I like having alternatives. I've got a licensed copy of MS Office on one of my PC's but I'll also use Google Apps or free desktop office suite alternatives.
Entertainment
Wrestlemania 37 is now history (and also the RAW following it). I was somewhat disappointed, expecting rumored returns of Lynch and Rousey; would Brock Lesnar and/or CM Punk return? As to Wrestlemania, the matches pretty much ended up like I thought although I was mildly surprised the two male heel champs retained their belts. I thought they might book Edge over Bryan, hence protecting Reigns' heel persona. It does seem a waste of Edge's comeback Rumble win to come up empty at Mania. But you could argue that Lashley and Reigns needed the wins to build their heel persona.
I wasn't thrilled how they booked the Fiend into jobbing to Randy Orton, who exploited Alexa Bliss' swerve turn on the Fiend. I was confused with what had happened, thinking at first that they had channeled the legendary Sister Abigail character from Wyatt's past. I also didn't like how they took the International title off Big E by having him squashed by a 7-foot ally of Apollo Crews. Rumor has it Big E is being groomed for Reign's next challenger and had to job the title. I have always been a fan of Crews' phenomenal skills in the ring but this rogue Nigerian prince persona just doesn't work with me.
I don't recall off the top of my head when male heels held all the belts, solo and tag team. I'm not surprised at how they've booked McIntyre into a rematch with Lashley at Backlash. Let's hope it's not another rerun of the Orton/McIntyre program. I keep hoping they'll book Lesnar into the program to set up the long-rumored dream match.
I did like their booking of Kevin Owens into a victory over Zahn. However, having Owens stun Logan Paul, offering his hand in friendship, was trite phone-it-in Stone Cold Steve Austin story telling. I think they need to build more on Owens' own character; it's bad enough he's resorting to Austin's signature finisher.
I did think Bianca Belair's win was well-deserved. The long pony tail gimmick is annoying but she is probably the female equivalent to Apollo Crews in terms of athleticism. I didn't get the EST gimmick at first; is this some online acronym I didn't know? I then noticed how she kept pointing out she was the prettiEST, baddEST, strongEST, etc. Okay, I get it, but it's still a dumb gimmick.
