Post #5354 J

 Shutdown Diary

The latest stats from Washpo:

In the past week in the U.S. ...

New daily reported cases fell 0.2% 

New daily reported deaths rose 20.9% 

Covid-related hospitalizations fell 6.2%

Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 8.3%.

The number of tests reported fell 5.1% 

In the last week, an average of 777.0k doses per day were administered, a 9% increase  over the week before. An average of 256.2k adults received the first dose in the U.S. over the last week

According to CDC:

It looks like we are on the decline from the peak of this wave; deaths tend to be a lagging indicator of serious infection. If my interpretation is correct, we should see falling death rates within the next 2 weeks. But declining hospitalization, positivity rates , and number of tests are positive signs we have finally turned the corner.

The big news obviously the FDA advisory panel's recommendation against a blanket approval for COVID-19 booster shots, apparently unswayed by Pfizer's data and/or Israeli data behind its approval for 50+-age adults. They did approve it for 65+ age adults and the immuno-compromised. The FDA could override the recommendation, but it's not likely to.

The politics on both sides of the vaccine policy debate annoy me. I don't like Biden's unconstitutional power grab to use OSHA to mandate large-enough (100+) worker companies to require proof of vaccination. That has apparently strengthened a black market in fake vaccine cards, certainly already stoked by employer or college/school pre-OSHA mandates. Now keep in mind a chunk of the unvaccinated are younger school age kids under 12. There is a rumor we could see an approval for these kids maybe as soon as Halloween or so, although most estimates I've seen have been early to mid winter. [As I write Monday, Pfizer reports success in its age 5-11 child vaccine, reportedly one-third the adult dosage. Presumably it's delivered its data or is in the process in submitting it to the FDA.]  As to adults, there are debates on exceptions for health intolerance and/or religious exemptions. (I'm not aware of organized religions opposing vaccines in concept, maybe Christian Scientists ) Red state governors are not only dismissive of calls for vaccine mandates for residents, but even public sector employees. And don't even start talking about vaccine passports; many libertarians, like Tom Woods, and GOP politicians will have a meltdown. (Personally I don't like the idea of having private sector companies being held liable for federal/state enforcement of mandates.) I would generally prefer a carrot vs. stick approach  to mandates. I really don't see police strapping adults down to be forcibly jabbed. I think it's more likely to be more of policy alternatives like tax penalties, healthcare surcharges, or public facility/event admission qualification. 

Life's Little Problems

The Windows iTunes desktop client has been mentioned in my sister SoftDoc blog on multiple occasions. (I used to own an iPod Shuffle;) I've run into various issues over the years, in particular, troublesome upgrades (a recurring one was the install process would hang and tell me it was looking for some file that didn't exist); when I migrated my music libraries to my new main workhorse PC, playlists were more difficult to transfer. (Sure, it's easy to create new playlists, but I've got some playlists with hundreds of tunes.).  Currently I use VLC player on my cellphone for the music collection on my soundcard; I can use iTunes on my PC for music, but now I'm using it mostly to play my podcasts.

I've experienced some occasional weirdness with podcast functionality (and also possibly in conjunction with my cloud backup solution). To give an example, I've sometimes discovered dozens of (unwatched) episodes in my recycle bin, I've also seen dozens of episodes suddenly replicated in podcast storage, and over the weekend I found hundreds of old Tom Woods podcasts were being uploaded de novo to the cloud (I routinely back up my music/podcast collection), so apparently they were recently downloaded without any action on my part.

But the focus of this discussion is the podcast interface. (Getting there is sometimes a usability issue. The default is music and you have to pull down a menu to switch from music to podcasts. On frequent occasions, I've found it difficult to get the menu to pull down.) Typically I'll see a list of podcasts for which I hold subscriptions, and I select a title to see a list of available episodes.

I've seen weird things. One is I don't have  backlog of Fox News Sunday episodes. So usually the most recent podcast will download between Sunday to Tuesday. The issue is I've sometimes seen the podcast title disappear after I've listened to and deleted the most recent episode, without any unsubscribe action on my part. If necessary, I was prepared to resubscribe, but it seems like iTunes remembers I'm subscribed and the title reappears with the next episode.

Then there was this past weekend when I noticed at least a half dozen podcast showed a status of "Not Subscribed", with no action on my part. What the devil? I clicked on the podcast settings (left gear-like button on the right side of the podcast episode header.) There is a third item "Subscribed" toggle switch. Sure enough, it was toggled Off--but worse than that, it seemed locked because I couldn't toggle it back on. How do I fix this? Delete the podcast and resubscribe? I decided to wait and see what happened if and when the podcasts released new episodes. In fact, all the "not subscribed" podcasts downloaded the episode, and the status now correctly showed as "subscribed". Somehow the problem corrected itself. I must have spent an hour looking for tips on how to unlock that toggle switch, and none of them had worked.

The next issue dealt with a recent change to one of my cloud computing subscription clients; I won't identify the well-known vendor, but for some time they used  a backup solution that worked well; I have most of my workfiles under an umbrella folder. They've now redesigned the local drive to be virtual, streaming architecture, although they have a mirroring option. I think they automatically converted me to run off their new architecture. Suppose the drive is mounted under P letter. I can see the cloud drive files under P. The problem it doesn't seem to mount my local folders/files as specified during setup, so my guess is I'll need to relocate, say, my iTunes folder to the mirrored location and reset my location in iTunes to run off the new location if I want my new/changed/deleted (e.g., podcast) files to be synced with the cloud. I found I could force a sync by robocopying my umbrella folder to the relevant P drive folder. That's not a good solution for me to put in a task scheduler, because the vendor sometimes requires me to sign onto my cloud account via popup. The vendor could have done a better job transitioning users and setting expectations with respect to the client software. 

Miscellaneous Items

It looks like my blog readership has improved over last month, although things could change in the last third of the month--maybe reverting to the long-term mean assuming the current trend continues. I have now passed the 400 post mark for the year, meaning I'll probably hit 500 by late fall, with last year's count possible this year.

I have to admit I'm still baffled by WWE booking. Big E brought his newly won WWE title to Smackdown and got himself in a brawl against Reign's bloodline faction (for vague reasons), teaming with Finn Balor. Long story short, that set up Reigns and his cousins against the  reunited New Day (including Big E) on Monday's RAW. I thought they were saving that for Survivor Series.  What was really interesting was how a vengeful Lashley intervened, setting up a triple threat with  Big E and Reigns. Now you know they aren't going to let Reigns job the match, but I loved the matchup versus the original 6-man tag match.