Pandemic Review
The latest weekly stats from WaPo:
The latest stats from CDC:
A modest uptick to about 13.8K daily new cases. We finally saw the end of the federal pandemic emergency this past week; this is not an end of the pandemic; thousands are still getting infected and hundreds dying. It's still a problem but more of a manageable risk. What about expiring relevant healthcare subsidies? It appears nearly all vaccine shots should still be "free", tests and meds may be free so long as government supplies last; in other cases, your out-of-pocket costs may depend on your healthcare insurance coverage policies. And it's not just the US stepping down from emergency status; the WHO is also downgrading the pandemic globally. Ob a more controversial note, NIH is resuming contentious coronavirus research
We continue to see reduced frequency of state/local reporting of stats, but this segment is subject to change based on my ability to access relevant data and will likely be phased out in the coming months.
Other Notes
One of the annoyances I have with Peacock is uncontrolled autoplay--great for catching up/binging on a series' episodes; but, e.g., after I caught up on The Voice, Peacock might launch into old episodes of America's Got Talent or the 90's series Quantum Leap. I also don't like the cumbersome way of using my cable remote to pause content on Peacock. This is a hassle, say if nature calls or you get a phone call. It's a breeze to pause using my Amazon Fire remote. An obvious solution is to download and configure the Peacock app on my Fire device.
I had my primary external drive die this week. It happens periodically, not that often: I think maybe 4-5 years back to the last incident. I was doing some routine archival, and Windows started erring out right in the middle of the job. Initially I thought maybe I had a syntax/permissions issue with the archival job, but after a routine reboot, Windows no longer saw the formatted partition on disk, i.e., at minimum I lost all the data on disk, not to mention it was the primary disk for my Mailstore repository. Now I have multiple external drives, and I could replace 99% of files on a new formatted volume partition.. In the case of Mailstore I had a month end archival backed up elsewhere and I still had most of the past week's gmail in the cloud, so maybe I lost 2-3 days of emails--not that big a deal. Mostly I'm worried about things like vendor receipts, but normally I can access those online, not to mention I often use my Joplin web clipper to capture transactions. In any event Windows could see the disk but couldn't seem to initialize and format the drive. I suspect there's been a hardware failure. I may continue to play with it as time permits.
In the meanwhile, I ordered a new "12 TB" (probably 1 TB less as usable) drive from Amazon for under $150. It takes a few hours to copy over 1 TB+. I'm tweaking my archiving scripts/schedule.
I bought my first ratchet belt. Belts for heavier guys can be a hassle and the ups and downs of dieting complicate things. I had to figure how to hack down one end of the belt (yeah, Amazon sells scissors that cut leather) and figure out how to release the belt. It's not that complicated, but some things are designed differently than expected.
