Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
The latest from CDC:
Cases are down to 48.4K daily. Notice the growing light green band trend in the variant charts? BF-7 has gone from a trace to 3.4% in just a few weeks. This MSN post discusses a little about it here: We don't know a lot about it yet other than there are nuances from earlier variants, but there is hope that the new bivalent boosters may be one of the best defenses. I haven't seen a lot of other headlines, other than Canadian is relaxing some of its travel/mandate restrictions and Italy relaxing some mass transit rules. Also, I've seen a number of education reports about some poor educational achievement in lower schools during remote learning phases during the pandemic.
Other Notes
Lower readership numbers for the blog over the latter third or so of the month, about the second lowest month totals over the past 6 months (also multi-year lows), above the 1K level but maybe a 30% drop from August. Disappointing with special-format (non-daily) posts barely breaking double-digits and few daily posts doing the same. We do seem to be on trend for another 500+ post year, and post #6000, another blog milestone, is likely during November.
We're into autumn; my A/C hasn't cut on more recently, and I'm seeing a few dead leaves when I go into my car for occasional errands.
Weird Walmart outages. I use a standard drip coffeemaker for brewing coffee and iced tea. Initially I was looking dor a spare carafe. I scanned Amazon and it was like you might well buy a new coffeemaker and I didn't see any cheap models (say under $20). I checked Walmart.com and they showed their budget private label line ones available. I could have bought one for pickup, but I felt, "Hey, I've got to do a grocery run this weekend anyway." So I show up--and no kidding. Their entire stock of drip coffeemakers, except display models, picked clean. Oh, they had Keurig/style coffeemakers in stock across the aisle, but I've never seen or heard of a run on drip models before. I did find something, however, I did not expect--a relatively cheap replacement carafe.
Prices still have me doing a double take. At least eggs seem to be trending back down from $3 to about $2.15/dozen at Lidl. I'll sometimes do some opportunistic purchases. Today gives a good example. Lidl was selling a 100-count K-cup box of Colombian coffee for about $15. A good comparable box at Sam's Club might run $25-30.
My workhorse laptop is slowly dying. Eventually I'll replace it; among other things, Microsoft won't upgrade it to Windows 11. But my touchpad no longer functional, so I had to scrounge up a spare USB mouse. And I found a screen defect with my old Chromebook (no longer supported by Google for OS updates). I got it to work off my external monitor but it defaults to extended desktop mode, so I had to change to mirror mode to make it usable.
My latest annoyance is with Amazon, in particular its Kindle support. The context is I have over 2000 titles in my Kindle library (so I'm a fan and a frequent customer; a number of them are free, e.g., you get a free selection from a choice of several a month as a Prime customer). Amazon provides a cloud reader app, but normally I'll download to my PC via the Wintel Kindle app. Two of my titles will not download. Now I can read them on the cloud so no big deal but it's a pain in the sense I have to download newer titles around them. I had a long chat with probably a half dozen or more support analysts. I think they time out internally every several minutes, and it seems nobody understands the issue. I try explaining it's not a licensing issue, it's not a general download issue. I'm not sure--maybe the titles are incompatible with the qpp; maybe there's a corrupt file problem. One analyst asks if I've tried deleting the book and trying to download it again. Actually, that's an interesting issue. There is no such functionality in the app. I think you can indirectly drop it from a device through a link in the Amazon website. I also met a typical support jerk with a cookie cutter approach, "You've got to play by my rules or I won't play with you.". That is, you have to deinstall the app and reinstall. In Amazon's case this is especially a pain in the ass because you have re-"purchase" the app to get a download link. And of course, by the time this is done (no change, of course, in the problem), the analyst has been replaced. So as I write, the problem remains unresolved. I can't believe they don't have an SOP for titles that don't download. Like I wrote, there's a workaround by accessing the titles through the Internet. It's just annoying having to work around the titles in the app.
