Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from Washpo:
In the past week in the U.S. ...
New daily reported cases rose 59.8%
New daily reported deaths fell 6.9%
Covid-related hospitalizations rose 37.6%
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 7.2%.
The number of tests reported fell 11.8%
In the last week, an average of 566.4k doses per day were administered, a 9% increase
According to CDC:
Cases continue to climb especially in lower-vaccination red states like AR, LA, and MS. Cases nationwide now are up to over 50K daily, with Monday's total up to 90K--nearly 6 digits, although Monday's tend to be cumulative over a weekend. I notice that the testing positivity rate has surged for weeks now. Still, Biden's coveted 70% partially vaccinated adult ratio is edging within reach but it will probably close early next month. Despite the surge in cases, vaccination rates have barely edged up, amounting to about 1% of the population getting a single dose each week.
One of my Sam's Club emails specifically emphasized no-wait free shots at its pharmacy. When I went to get a pharmacy refill at Walmart's this afternoon, I noted an elderly woman sitting in a makeshift waiting room of chairs nearby, obviously the 15-minute post vaccination period. Again, Walmart is posting signs of free vaccination availability (within pharmacy hours).
There seems to be an increasing trend of hospitals (e.g., St. Jude's) and government health departments (Veterans Affairs) of mandating vaccines for customer-interfacing employees. I'm actually surprised that they haven't already done the same. I think the military will follow suit (as Massie fears) in the weeks ahead. I would not be surprised if we see the same rollouts in the private sector for salesmen, restaurant staffers and hospitality personnel, among others. It also looks like the FDA wants data collection from the mRNA vaccine makers (Pfizer and Moderna) on vaccines for K-6 students as well.
I made a passing reference in my recent essay on my latest Twitter kerfuffle about the "Good Morning, Liberty" podcast and their signature "Dumb BLEEP of the Week" episodes. I was listening to a recent episode when host Nate Thurston admitted that he's not vaccinated and then went on a rant, totally dismissive of the case of COVID-19 and children. Let's just say from my own point of view, Nate Thurston has become his own "Dumb BLEEP of the Week". Roughly 1 in 7 Americans diagnosed with COVID-19 is a child. Although they tend to get infected at a disproportionately lesser rate of the population, some, particularly with serious health issues like type 1 diabetes, can develop severe illness and require hospitalization, even die (I've read a few anecdotal cases) Let's be clear: kids are not immune from viruses:
Viral infections are common among people of all ages but often seem to be concentrated in infants and children. Most childhood viral infections are not serious and include such diverse illnesses as colds, sore throat, vomiting and diarrhea, and fever with a rash. Some viral illnesses that cause more serious disease, such as measles, are less common now due to widespread immunization.
Babies in particular may be vulnerable due to less mature respiratory and immune systems. There are theories as to why older children seem to be less susceptible to symptomatic infections and/or more serious illness. But contrary to Thurston's nonsense, the nature of viral infections and their spread isn't different among children; I noted in a past past that 2 of my grandnieces, in the tween/early teen age range, caught the infection on a school trip and spread it to the rest of my oldest nephew's family.
It wasn't clear to me why Thurston is taking the risk of choosing not to vaccinate (he does seem profoundly skeptical of the FDA/CDC). It doesn't surprise me; he and Tom Woods, like a number of Ron Paul acolytes, are probably following Paul's lead in venting against Fauci and others. (Ron Paul seems now about as obsessed with Fauci as he is over the Federal Reserve. Of course, his son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), has had notorious clashes with Fauci in Senate hearings.) Of all coincidences, Tom Woods, whose podcast has been obsessed with critical COVID-19 coverage, has developed pneumonia, a respiratory illness, and recently took a week off to recover.
Life's Little Problems
Receipts. Some of my pet peeves in life involve them. Oracle probably still owes me expense reimbursement from 1998. The official story is that I was laid off from Oracle because of a shortfall in billing assignments.
The real story was I had begged off a Chicago Public Schools consulting project about 2 months earlier. A background story is necessary for context. I had been tech lead on an ERP implementation project for the City of Oakland. After 6 months or so of commuting every other weekend from Chicago, I think managers wanted to cut down project travel expenses. and decided to transition my role to a California-based DBA. My practice manager said that he wasn't going to assign me s follow-up project ; rather, I needed to find my own follow-up consulting assignment from an internal job board. Long story short, I ended up getting an offer to join a project at a GE plant in Indiana. Among other things, I would be getting cutting-edge experience with Oracle's latest and greatest software, which would look good on my internal resume. So the only thing that needed to happen was getting my practice manager's consent, which is usually a formality.
Long story short, my practice manager turned down the offer. Why? I didn't know this at the time but he used the offer as leverage to get me placed on a Chicago Public School ERP implementation project. Why? Because since I was local to the Chicago area, he didn't have to pay travel expenses. (Never mind it was more than an hour-plus commute one way.) Seriously, dude. He had turned down an assignment that would have improved my internal assignment marketability, better from a career perspective.
At first, I thought, "Well, not bad; I go from a lead DBA on a platinum project (meaning an Oracle VP sat on the project team) at Oakland to a lead position at CPS." Wrong. For several reasons. First of all, they already had like 5 or 6 other DBA's on the team. They didn't even have production hardware. You didn't need 6 or 7 DBA's for a test server. I have no clue why the project manager was collecting DBA's like postage stamps. I was mostly assigned to project documentation, which had zero to do with my tech skills. (There was a minor gig in the interim gig at a Georgia auto parts supplier which was to do an EBS on Windows install. At the time a week was aggressive if I hit the ground running. This was a time I couldn't download the software from Oracle, and the client didn't have the software on site. I tried to get Oracle to ship the CDs overnight and somehow they didn't get it to the carrier in time. Two days in Georgia, and I'm sitting on my hands. There's more to the story, but at some point, my PM cut me short of completing the assignment, saying I'm needed (for paperwork) at CPS, and Oracle would be sending someone else to finish the job. The last I heard from my client manager, Oracle didn't follow-up, and the company decided on implementing an alternative solution. I was freaking angry over this. I did everything I could for my customer and I thought what Oracle did was wrong.)
There were two major problems I had with the CPS project over and beyond my marginal role: the first was the project was installing an older version: 10.7 SC of Oracle Apps/EBS. Oracle had already released a newer version. I pointed out this was stupid: this tied CPS into doing a major upgrade in maybe just 2 years (for Oracle Support maintenance reasons as Oracle desupports older software). I was tersely told that the city contract specified said version and it would be better for me to keep such thoughts to myself.
The second issue was I was assigned a deliverable that basically called on me to provide a cost-benefit analysis of why CPS would be better off deploying EBS than relying on legacy operations. I had zero information on CPS operations and very limited access to any CPS personnel. I may have 2 graduate business degrees, including an MBA, but anything I attempted here would be purely speculative and not credible; pulling numbers out of the thin air would undermine my credibility and reputation.
I made some stabs at the deliverable; I explored some things like maybe EBS would enable to CPS to close its books quicker and more accurately every year with fungible benefits. When I finally got access to a CPS manager and asked her how long it took to close their books, she replied (I'll never forget). "Good question. We've never closed our books. That's why we've hired you guys to figure it out."
I floated other ideas, like maybe by standardizing accounts payables, they could reduce manpower requirements. (I'm sure the CPS union would have loved that one.) But I couldn't even get a good number on their A/P clerks, never mind compensation, or how I would estimate relevant unit business costs or come up with a benchmark on clerk performance on EBS.
Each day I was getting supervisory pressure to deliver a past-due document, which I strongly believed would be a violation of professional ethics. Finally, I went to my practice manager and demanded to be released from the project. I didn't explicitly threaten to resign, but I was prepared to, and I think he knew it. Rejecting assignments was not considered to be good for my career as a senior principal at Oracle. And it was something he had personally negotiated with the PM that had now come back to bite him. I was sent on one final project, a failing State of Oklahoma project, which I single-handedly turned around.
Long story to explain that after I left Oracle, I ended up getting manila folders forwarded to downtown Chicago offices, which I almost never visited since I was usually billing on customer sites. They never mailed the stuff to my home address, of course. So one day, sometime after I left Oracle, I found some of my receipt hardcopies with scotch taped receipts returned to me rejected, not over validity but for some nitpicky reason, of the type like certain receipts needed to be mounted on their own separate pages. So, of course, I never got to resubmit the receipts, which probably means I never got reimbursed (which is like stealing from me).
I was pretty anal-retentive about receipts during my road warrior days. I've met a lot of unethical people in the industry. On one Chicago project, I had to deal with a literally crazy Tampa-based DBA, CB. One day we go to lunch at a local McDonald's, and he's going around the dining room collecting every abandoned customer receipt he could find, no doubt intending to expense the most expensive receipt.
For me, receipts are now mostly used to cross-check credit card statements. I hate it when, say, I request a receipt when I start to pump gas and then afterwards I see a message to collect my receipt inside. Dude, I'm not that interested in a receipt to wait in line to get one.
But the problem I saw at my favorite grocery store Lidl recently is a new one. As familiar readers know, I almost always go to self-checkout. My local store has 4 checkout kiosks. One of the kiosks is offline. I'm waiting for one of the other 3 to open up. This one dude literally has at least 6 separate bags he's separating his groceries into: seriously, dude? One of the store's managers sees me waiting and opens up the kiosk. I'm wary like--why was this kiosk offline in the first place? I soon discovered at least one reason--I go to weigh a bunch of bananas (most produce is packaged). The register freaks out and says wait for a cashier to come to me. This isn't like at Walmart's where they have a person attending a group of kiosks. Most likely, it's a cashier from a regular lane between customers. She can't fix it and tells me to go to another kiosk with a functional scale. I really don't want to rescan all my items again: I don't need bananas that much. The remainder of the scanning goes without incident--I pay for my groceries and patiently wait for my receipt: which doesn't come.
Now I'm sure they're monitoring me and I don't want to leave without a receipt. For the next 15-20 minutes I'm waiting for the banana lady and the female manager who had opened the kiosk to figure out what's wrong; it's not a problem with the paper roll. The female manager says she'll go to the back and generate the receipt--eventually comes back emptyhanded. She offers to ring me up--again--in another lane. I protest: "I've already paid..." She says, "I know you did." So I decided to leave without a receipt. All the time I thought I was saving by going to a kiosk was more than offset by waiting for them to fix these problems. I'm not sure why Lidl doesn't automatically email me a grocery receipt like ShopRite does. For instance, Lidl will automatically email when I've won a shopping coupon award.
I want to revisit an issue I mentioned in a past post, involving VLC playlists on Android. It's an odd thing where it doesn't seem to find playlists I know exist if I query, but if I go to add a track to a playlist, it sees them. I think I've figured out what's going on. I think it's technically doing an extended search of the playlists on the phone, including my SD card. I think technically the playlists are in a small database file in the root of the phone. (I'm not sure why their search doesn't seem to start there, but apparently after a certain period of time it'll eventually come across the playlists.) I'll have to time how long the search takes, Perhaps I've been spoiled by Youtube Music and other apps where playlists are almost instantly available.
Various Notes
Although I'm on a trend to my first 50+ post month this year, the blog's readership has tanked over the last 2 weeks or so. What seemed to be likely to be my fifth consecutive 2000-pageview month now looked to be trending to the lowest viewership in 6 months as daily views slumped to the 30-50 range. As I write, for some reason I've surged to my first 100-view evening in weeks. It's now possible for the streak to continue if I turn in decent numbers at the higher end of the recent trend, but it's not a sure thing.
Hallmark is heading down the home stretch of its Christmas in July promotion. It's already starting to promote its annual Countdown to Christmas just 3 months away. It finally ended one of its longest running series, "Good Witch". I occasionally watched these a few years back but haven't been interested lately. I haven't heard of plans for new replacement series, but I'll point out that it's had two popular recent movie series, "The Wedding March" and "All of My Heart". I could easily see either movie series developed into an episodic series, although I think the leads of the latter already have a mystery series on HMM.
Well, WWE partly made up for NXT champ Cross' inexplicable job to Jeff Hardy last week (rumor has it Hardy has been infected with COVID and is in quarantine) by having a returning Keith Lee job to him, after jobbing to Bobby Lashley last week. I'm not exactly sure where Lee has been for the last few months off TV. If nothing else, I could easily have seen Keith Lee going back to NXT to regain his former belt. But they seem to have planned a returning Samoa Joe to take Cross' belt, freeing him up for RAW full-time.
It seems like RAW is scripting unlikely new women's champ Nikki A.S.H. (almost a super hero) into a 3-way defense against Charlotte Flair and Rhea Ripley. It's easy how they can script Charlotte and Rhea into beating the hell out of each other, letting the undersized Nikki to escape with the title intact.
I had assumed that Smackdown did a bait-and-switch by having Reigns turn down Cena's challenge for SummerSlam to accept Finn Balor's challenge. However, I've seen a couple of sources suggest Balor's challenge is for an interim challenge on Smackdown with the plan to still do presumably Reigns/Cena for SummerSlam. There are also rumors for the Rock at Survivors Series, a New Year's Day PPV, and a Queen of the Ring tournament. (Do I need to remind fans Charlotte Flair is referred to as the Queen?)
