Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from WaPo:
In my last journal post I had predicted we were at or near the top of the lagging death count indicator wave; I watched the rolling average change direction multiple times over the past week, so the awaited decline is not yet firmly established but clearly the hospitalized and death trends are correlated. New cases are now dropping down to the lower 100'Ks, a huge drop from the 800K range just a few weeks back.
There are a few notable talking points since the last post:
- the CDC is reporting waning effectiveness of booster shots after 4 months or so. No related discussions of a fourth (mRNA) vaccine that I've seen yet, although Israel has been investigating it; The results of a fourth Pfizer shot show a 5-fold increase in antibodies, but apparently not enough to stave off omicron infections.
- The FDA wants more data on young child 3-dose vs. 2-mini-dose regimen. Pfizer says it won't have the data for about 2 months.
- We have seen a recent trend of mostly Dem states roll back mask mandates.
- We are seeing a trend away from a COVID-19 pandemic to an endemic, not unlike the seasonal flu. That is, hopes of herd immunity and eradication of the disease are fading, particularly given glacially slow cumulative vaccination increases, well below a heuristic level of 85% or so Fauci and others have mentioned. We don't know exactly what that looks like yet: an annual COVID shot?
Miscellaneous Notes
Blog readership has modestly improved to a more consistent level; not sure if I'll hit my monthly informal 2000 pageviews in a short month. I still don't understand why some days I barely get a baker's dozen of pageviews and the next day I could get 10 times that number.
My Twitter stats are also dragging. mostly because of boring partisan trends. I never can tell when some tweets will take off. For example, I just snapped last night when Trump was once again arguing alleged Obama/Hillary misconduct on his 2016 campaign. as "worse than Watergate" and Trumpkins were taking their cues. The fact is Trump had called on Russians to release Clinton's government emails, some possibly with classified data. (I find myself trolling leftists still arguing the Clinton email issue is a nothingburger.) Trump has always been undisciplined and impulsive; he would later excuse his plea to Russia as a "joke". But, and I can't speak for the Obama Administration, Trump's "joke" was reason enough to scrutinize Trump's ties with Russia. So I wrote a sarcastic tweet that the Clinton campaign hired a Trump impersonator to tell the "joke". The tweet apparently stirred up Trumpkins, with at last check over 550 impressions and nearly 30 engagements.
I recently extended my Security+ certification through early 2026. (You have to accumulate enough continuing education units to extend one's certificate for another 3 years. Other professions, like accounting and nursing, have comparable requirements. I am not employed primarily as a security analyst; familiar readers know I've primarily worked as a database administrator since 1993, with ancillary experience as a system administrator and developer and as a project tech leader. I've done a ton of security patching and STIG compliance activities over the years on my day job. For a number of IT contracting and consulting gigs especially in the government sector, the client requires relevant CompTIA certification.
I think I'm experiencing an annoying Thunderbird email client bug involving the trash folder. I don't keep huge email folders on the client but will stage them out to my MailStore repository. I sometimes find after purging my local email folders that attempts to delete subsequent messages will fail essentially arguing there isn't room.in the trash folder. (There is plenty of room on disk.) Usually restarting the email client will resolve the issue, but the bug is annoying.
I finally watched "Reacher" on Amazon Prime. I have a distinct sense of déjà vu in writing this brief review. I thought I had written one to my family but couldn't find it; did I publish it in the blog? A Google search didn't show it, and I had only written one journal post in the timeframe, where I would have posted it. So maybe I fat-fingered it. At any rate, I'm not much into action movies/series, but this one intrigued me. Reacher is a wickedly smart loner who gets wrongly charged with murder while visiting a sleepy Georgia town looking to pay his respects to a deceased blues musician. I don't want to write spoilers for the plot, but suffice it to say he's stumbled into an international organized crime operation which his estranged brother had been tracking from the law enforcement side and corrupt local government. I found the story compelling, but one nagging detail: is he ever going to eat a slice of the world-famous peach pie? You get the answer in the final episode; his ambivalent response is classic, in character. I know the character is the basis of a book series which I haven't read, so hopefully there will be a sequel series from Amazon.
My latest binge washing is old TV series on Amazon and Peacock where I might have missed earlier seasons. I'm currently focusing on "House". I love the idiosyncratic lead character and diagnostic problem-solving.
