Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
Well, a slight uptick to 21,8k cases daily but still at the slowest rate since last summ.
We are now officially in spring although it hasn't warmed enough to turn my thermostat heat off or go outside without at least a sweater. This is the first winter I can remember without snow since 2000 (except for 2015-2016 when I was in South Carolina and Arizona). (As I've grown older, the fun of chipping the ice off my car windshield and clearing the snow, never mind driving in the stuff, has gone away.) But the basic question is, what happened to the widely predicted third consecutive winter COVID-19 surge?
Experts told ABC News that a combination of more immunity, better treatments, less severe infections and more people following mitigation measures likely played a role.I don't usually use this segment to debate the politics but I've had at least a couple of relatives email or repost more critical perspectives on COVID-19 or vaccine policy matters. Don't get me wrong; I was skeptical of the economic shutdowns, crackdowns against people not masking on public transit, etc.But I have zero tolerance for anti-vaxxet rubbish. An appeals court has denied Biden's vaccine mandate for federal employees.It's hard to see why federal employers don't have the authority to protect workplace safety. And Comrade Berrnie, "King of Free Stuff", is badgering Moderna for not commiyying strongly enough to lower COVID-19 vaccine prices as federal emergency funding tapers off. {Moderna has already announced a free vaccine shot policy for the uninsured after the federal funding expired and points out one loses economy of scale as the pandemic wanes and they produce single-dose vials, that projected prices are competitive with other vaccine costs]. And I want to note the better option is improved competition in the marketplace, and federal regulations, including vaccine approval, affect that. Finally, Biden has signed the bill to declassify COVID-19 origins data. (I don't think he had an alternative; the bill approval vote was basically veto-proof.) I don't object to improved transparency but don't expect any smoking guns because most federal agencies didn't express more than low confidence in favor of the lab leak hypothesis.
Some people have been getting off-label second bivalent booster prescriptions. The FDA has still not nade a decision, although the UK and perhaps Canada have extended it to the at-risk population, particularly the older population. In the US, the rate of bivalent booster seniors is half that of Britain's, even though just over 97% of US deaths are now from those 50+.
Other Notes
With the exception of Sunday (when I often publish arguably my most popular format post, my social media digest). readership has remained off the robust start of the month pace; we've already passed the 6-month low, but progressing last month's total (with 3 fewer days) is no longer inevitable. Twitter readership is somewhat lower but ok. Quite often the hot trends aren't interesting to me; I don't only tweet on hot trends, but it's a way of getting more exposure to other Twitter usera. It's not unusual for me to tweet a half dozen times a week or so on sports or wrestling, for instance.
The gold standard Office suite (spreadsheet, document, presentation, database) is Microsoft Office. There are free alternatives, of course, like Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice, not to mention Google's online apps. Microsoft is also marketing its 365 subscription model. I have no financial interest in Microsoft or its vendors, but for interested readers, there's currently an offer for a one-payment $40 license for Office 2021. I usually maintain a licensed copy on one of my PC's (including backup ones) for technical reasons (like work file compatibility and consistent presentation of functionality).
It's hard to tell whenever I'll face the next technical issue. For example, I maintain my iTunes library in a directory I backup to the cloud. (You can specify a non-default location in preferences.) I routinely check my cloud directory online. So, the canary in the coal mine was I deleted a podcast episode and it didn't appear in my cloud trash. Why? Long story short, the podcast episodes were now being downloaded to the default podcast location. It's not clear why it had reverted; the software looks at an itl file. The itl file in the cloud directory hadn't recently been updated there. I checked my preferences and saw it was in the install directory. No problem, right? I'll just change the directory back. And it seemed to process the update. I restarted iTunes--and it looked like nothing happened--back to the install directory. I googled the issue and noticed someone had questioned an Apple Support forum with essentially the same issue. No explanation how or why it happened but it seems if you hold the shift button while starting up iTunes, you'll get prompted for your itl file to use, and I set it to the last updated version in my local copy of the cloud drive. That seemed to resolve the issue.
Mail Store Home (my external disk email repository) had an unusual problem abending during the upgrade. I downloaded and installed the latest full version which resolved the issue.
Cables, cables, cables. I have older devices (like external drives, mice, keyboards, flash drives, and my older Amazon Fire tablet) that connect to a conventional (female) USB(-A) port to older laptops, desktops, and/or power banks/hubs/chargers. My Garmin devices need a male mini-B connector to (male) USB(-A) to transfer/charge from a PC or other power source interface. Newer PCs, Chromebooks and devices (like newer Amazon tablets) have USB type C (female) ports. [I'm simplifying nuances like USB 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 relevant to PC USB type A ports,.You can buy USB type C (male) to USB type A. There are adapters that will let you take a type A charge cable and convert it to a type C male. Part of the reason I've gone to this detail is I recently bought an SD/micro-SD to USB adapter but it has a type C connector which pretty much restricts its use for me to use with my Chromebook and Android phone. I've got SD slots/adapters I can use with my legacy notebook SD slots and there are some adapters you can buy with both Type A and Type C connectors.
I don't usually connect my Android to my PC that often. (For one thing, I can use my cloud storage account to migrate, say, some new mp3 files to my Android SD card.) I was puzzled why I wasn't seeing the device after USB cord connection but one of my cloud accounts popped up and wanted to know if I wanted to do file transfers. Some obsolete stuff on the web was irrelevant. Long story short: the way to access/mount the device is via ThisPC in File Explorer.
Then I had a problem with VLC playlist duplicates. I'll probably write this up in an upcoming SoftDoc post later. I basically discovered VLC on Android stores playlist data in a SQLite database. I learned SQL (a relational database query language) back in grad school and can do SQL in my sleep. (I've professionally managed relational databases for 30 years.) Anyway, I haven't done SQLite, but not a big problem. I figured how to dump the database, migrate to my PC (see prior paragraph), download SQLite tools to my PC, figured out the song duplicates, and then manually dedupped the playlist from 500+ songs to 188; I'm not sure how I entered so many duplicates. I'm annoyed with how they designed the database to allow duplicates, and it would have been a lot easier to dedup using SQL directly. I think there's a way to directly access the database but I think you have to root your phone, and I don't want to risk that at this point.
