Pandemic Report
The latest CDC weekly stats:
Well, cases continue to surge across the country; for example , a Texas webpage claimed cases jumped 50% there over the past week. Even my local county reported a COVID-related death of someone being held in detention. The stat that particularly jumped out at me is the positivity rate well into double-digits.
It seemed every other relevant new post I saw this week focused on President Biden once again getting COVID, likely related to campaign-related travel. It's his third encounter with COVID. He reportedly has mild symptoms ("a runny nose, dry cough and a feeling of “general malaise.”) , is self-isolating in Delaware, is taking Paxlovid and showing improvement. He's also in a kerfuffle over appearing in public near staffers without wearing a mask, which CDC recommends to limit disease spread.
Other relevant news items of note:
- In a study of pregnant women, there was no increased risk of birth defects for women who got vaccinated during the first trimester.
- Prosecutors continue to pursue COVID relief fraud:
- A Florida man is charged with stealing $40K via fraudulent PPP loans
- A TN nursing home is being sued over the COVID death of an 89-year-old matriarch
- A UK government post-audit concluded it had been ill-prepared for the pandemic
Other Notes
The blog stats still seem a little bloated, roughly double my long-term trend. My latest essays, annotated transcripts of the Trump/Biden debate, have done better, a few dozen pageviews. I'm currently working on the third in the series. I had my first 1K+ impression tweet in months; I can't say I know the formula. There was a trend on leftists incensed Trumpkins were referring to Trump as President vs. former President. I pointed out that Obama drew a similar response.
Weird week where I separately experienced both a power outage (thunderstorm) and a cable/Internet outage overnight.
My latest tech enigmas dealt with one of those new smartbulbs and dealing with my old Google Hub. Amazon had a specially bundled smartbulb and the new budget Echo Pop. It took a while to get the smartbulb functional. I suspected it probably had to deal with obsolete or corrupted WIFI settings. It wasn't like there was a general WIFI setting. I also had a similar issue with the Google Hub. I seem to recall I did things like factory resets, reinstalling apps, dropping/adding new devices, etc. before I would get prompted for WIFI connection I eventually got the lightbulb functional by voice directions. It was slower for the lightbulb because the Echo Pop was shipped later/separately. The Google Hub was trickier.. I had mostly used it with this rotating screensaver of art pieces. But more recently the display seemed to have an embedded largely opaque dark frame covering all but a vertical right margin. What was it, some kind of Hub update affecting functionality? I soon figured out by changing display/picture frame settings and by swiping from the left side I could generate a legible black and white digital clock. Sound functionality (e.g., setting kitchen timers) seems unaffected. But the art screensaver doesn't seem to work with this pervasive dark background. Initially I thought maybe I had dropped the hub and messed up the display, but the clear legibility of the clock proves otherwise.
Then I found my Chromebook didn't seem to be working: none of my apps like gmail seemed to be working although my WIFI seemed functional. It seemed to be something like my core Google account sign-on was corrupted
I did buy a few things on Prime Day. I happened across this page of past consumable purchases that were discounted over original prices. Probably the "biggest" purchase was a portable monitor. I currently have 2 monitors I share among 2 desktops and 2 mini-PCs. My old HP laptop monitor is poorly legible and somewhat distorted in spots, so the new display nicely connects via HDMI.
