Post #6213 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest stats from WaPo: 13.3K

The latest from CDC:

About 13.3K cases daily as basic stats taper down, with deaths and hospitalizations near a pandemic low. CDC continues to modify its recommended vaccine policy, including international visitors to a single recent bivalent booster counting for fully vaccinated.

Fauci's post-audit critique of the US response to the pandemic:

We thought we were the best-prepared country in some respects from a scientific standpoint, as manifested by the overwhelming success of the rapid development of the vaccine, that we did very well. But when it came to the implementation of public health, the uniformity of a response, the communication, the ability to get data in real time, we really fell very short,

He identifies two major publicv policy problems:

•  "Divisiveness of our politics"
• "The fracturing of the US health care delivery system"

Other Notes

Blog stats are modestly up over last week but barring huge numbers this weekend, we're probably going to fall a third off the pace of the last couple of months

USPS Informed Delivery, the "sneak peek" of imminently deliverable mail and packages, can be annoying. For example, if I'm not expecting something from the IRS, it can mess with your mind until the postal carrier delivers the mail. Then there are the unexpected package deliveries. Sometimes it can be something like a sales promotion from a past/current vendor. Amazon and its sellers sometimes partner with USPS.. USPS doesn't give you a lot of information about the vendor. Take yesterday. I got a notice, also tracked by Shop, I got a partial extract of what apparently seemed to be an infant nutrition company. What the hell? I'm an older bachelor, no dependents. Had someone hacked a credit card? Long story short, it was indeed from a nutrition company--but not in my name. I guess a past resident had not corrected her address with the vendor. I've been at this address for maybe 18 months. The local post office doesn't do a good job filtering out past residents, maybe up to 20%. Life's little problems.

I started on my drive to the supermarket when my cellphone started chirping every few seconds. What the hell? Sometimes my 6 siblings get into text exchanges (coincidentally) often during my infrequent driving, but usually I see sender notices on my dashboards. Not now. It was annoying enough to make me want to pull off the road and turn off my phone. When I got to my destination, it's not like I had a popup of alerts, but I decided it had to be related to a coffee cup app I had recently installed, it may have had to do with going beyond my home network; I quickly turned off the audio notifications and force-stopped the app

What am I talking about? An Amazon company had a recent special on an Ember coffee mug. (still pricey). I am a coffee drinker, although not a Starbucks addict like a former SC supervisor.  So, the way this works is you have a heating/charged element in the bottom of a small (IMO) coffee mug and there's a charging element in the coaster, which you connect to a nearby socket. You use a Bluetooth connection to the app. The documentation suggests an initial charge time of 1.5 to 2 hours for the empty mug; it took me longer. Thee's a horizontal light in the front bottom of the mug if grasped with your right hand.

Connection can be finicky and you may have to work with a button in the center in the bottom of the mug. I've occasionally had to reset connection, including things like ensuring an empty, clean mug, clearing app data, resetting the power connection, restarting the phone, etc. It can take some patient trial and error. You can get exasperated and say, "Screw it! It's easier simply to nuke it a couple of minutes in the microwave or use a thermos." Normally after connection, assuming the mug isn't empty you'll see a degree F reading usually the heating element will ripple across the scale until the temperature has reached a 134 degree target/. You may need to toggle with the caret/arrow below the scale to turn on the heating element or reset the coffee button, e.g., my temperature seems stuck at 79 degrees. The nice thing is once it reaches your target, it's like setting your thermostat and you're set until you finish your mug.

My newest toy is a mini-PC, which is shaped like a smaller, thicker external drive with a number of ports/connectors on both edges. It's the only system I have with Windows 11 Pro installed. Attach an HDMI monitor, keyboard and mouse you're in business; configure your WIFI connection, update your Windows patches, attach cloud storage accounts, install some software. connect an external drive, do a backup.  Fairly inexpensive backup system.