by ezs | Jun 1, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – retrospectively – is this the week that changed the US? When will that be clear? Certainly there is a large grass roots outpouring of anger, support and a desire for change. An enormous story that knocked the coronavirus story from the front pages. Ironic (infuriating?) that on the anniversary of D Day that “anti antifa” is the Trump campaign slogan.
Almost two million cases in the US – and still climbing. I expect a pretty rapid rise in the non-distancing states, as well as second waves in others.
More counties opening in Washington state. A slight uptick in positive confirmed cases at the tail end of last week. More testing or a result of folk being out for the sunny weekend at the end of May?
Dozens of coronavirus victims being found weeks after death. That is distressing.
Lowest UK numbers of new cases – and zero deaths in NI and Scotland.
Sunday updates from The Seattle Times
Friday – hydroxychloroquine does not work against coronavirus – again.
Thursday – multiple states reporting upticks in number of cases; aligning closely with the lack of social distancing.
Wednesday – Brazil overtakes Italy in terms of deaths. Very avoidable.
Tuesday – truly exhausting. I couldn’t imagine that anything would take a global pandemic off the headlines.
Monday – my entire newsfeed has switched from coronavirus reporting and emerging from lockdown, to majority peaceful Black Lives Matter protests and the parallel violence, looting and associated police responses. There is even a curfew in Issaquah , WA.
Local and global coverage for future reference.
by ezs | May 25, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – Lockdown relaxation bringing spikes in new cases. Open too soon? Probable. Sports are slowly returning. Continued protests across the US. Continuing rioting in some areas. Seattle has 1700-0500 curfew in place. Attacks against the press.
Weekly look at WA state numbers via the Seattle Times.
Friday – Minneapolis burning. Trump tweets inciteful language. CNN camera crew arrested while broadcasting live. None of it COVID related. Lockdown being relaxed across the globe.
Thursday – sunny and warm again. Trump threatening “action” against social media companies by Executive Order. New cases of COVID in WA are mainly in under 40s. That’s worrying. Potential mutation?
Wednesday – after a week of gloom – the sun is out again – and warming up. Hopefully local social distancing and masks prevail. 100k US deaths from Covid – that’s over a 90 day period. That’s 3-4 plane crashes per day. The scale of deaths is just not comprehended. 50% of US people would not take a vaccine.
Tuesday – back to work. Cummings fallout continues in the UK. Hydroxychloroquine trials are dropped. WHO warns of second peak. Second COVID birthday in the family.
Monday – Memorial Day in the US. The start of summer. A holiday. For week 12 – it’s another day at home. Too many reports of folk out and not distancing or wearing masks. I suspect a combination of tribal politics, fatigue and “it only gets old people”. New case rate in Washington State is relatively flat (~250 per day), and death rate is slowly going down (single digit trend). I think early action had a massive effect.
Local and global coverage for future reference.
by ezs | May 19, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – a long weekend. Dominic Cummings row is slowly coming to the boil in the UK. BBC summary search optimisation: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world as the root. Horrible.
Saturday data from The Seattle Times
Friday – plenty of discussion about Washington State unemployment and how it’s been hit by online fraud. Identity theft and reuse of PII seem to be the cause. Good results from a project at work – “six months of work done in two weeks”. Churches “essential” says Trump, pandering to the base.
Thursday – another day of triple booked meetings. Urg. Work now realise that meetings are sucking every morsel of productive time out of the day. It’s like Microsoft again. Looking to reduce meeting load for the team. Daily standup and get to work.
Wednesday – 16 hours back to back on calls. Some work, some for 5th LD Dems. Online voting went really well. Cloudflare fronting a huge Azure E20s_v3 (160GB RAM, 20 vCPU) and zero issues.
Tuesday – continued linear growth of the number of cases around the globe. Second peaks appearing in the US. Lockdown isn’t consistent. Counting of deaths in the US is being fudged for political reasons. US trailing 7 day trend is down – but it’s mainly bubbling out the New York cases, remove that data and it’s up, up, up. 22k/day new cases.
Monday – Week 11. Really? Week 11? This week looks busy – AP exams for the eldest, big project trying to go live at work, building a voting mechanism for the local Dems. News continues to look positive (careful reopening of parts of WA State), negligent (widespread, willful ignoring of masks) and terrifying (Russia and Brazil cases)
Local and global coverage for future reference.
by ezs | May 12, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – first time out without the kids in 10 weeks. Socially distanced barbecue in the mountains. Brazil and Russia cases are growing quickly. UK daily deaths dropping.
Seattle Times continues with great local coverage; The Guardian summaries are another good archive (note: Google/Bing for site includes https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/mmm/dd/uk-cornavirus-live to find the majority of hits; BBC urls are really unfindable if you miss them).
Friday – echoing the experience in WA state – care homes, nursing homes and similar are a real hotspot for infection. “Warp Speed” for vaccine.
Thursday – 36M unemployed in the US, quarter of workforce on benefits, this winter could be “bleakest ever”.
Global case count is still increasing.
Wednesday – Coronavirus may never go away say WHO.
Tuesday – Russia coronavirus cases explode. Brazil 881 deaths today. Fauci says US not under control.
Tuesday data from The Seattle Times:
Monday – Week 10. UK lockdown guidance
Local and global coverage for future reference.
by ezs | May 10, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Last year I noted that the ASUS Access Points were pretty much end of life. A pair of RT-AC66U and RT-AC68U had been providing pretty solid wifi coverage for trusted, untrusted and guest devices for around seven years. Sporadic updates from ASUS; more frequent updates from RMerlinDev – but a clear sunsetting of seven year old hardware.
I had been eying multiple vendors over the last year or so – with an eye to replace both the trusted, untrusted and guest wifi with a consolidated set of hardware. In addition the edge firewall/IDS/IPS running IPfire was due for a replacement. Everything gets old.
I settled on Ubiquiti and their Unifi range. A couple of Unifi-AP-HD Access Points and a Unifi Security Gateway Pro should last a while. Future proofing – with an eye on end-to-end IP6 and fibre to the home – both should easily handle the additional complexity.
I built the Unifi Controller on a dedicated Ubuntu 20.04 server. That was a pain. Notes: MongoDB versions, JRE versions – and installation of the deb package. All too painful.
by ezs | May 4, 2020 | evilzenscientist
Weekend – it’s been weeks since I tracked the WA coronavirus numbers – mainly because there are great websites tracking the data, secondarily because the data reporting and metrics were so broken in early/mid-April.
Here’s the current (9 May) numbers from The Seattle Times. Curve of reported cases peaked in early April, about 10 days later for the reported death rate. The baseline is still quite high. I hope the weekend (sunny, warm, lifted restrictions, Mothers’ Day) doesn’t lead to an explosion of new cases in 2 weeks time.
Friday – 75th anniversary of VE Day, muted celebrations in UK. Coronavirus positive tests in White House staff.
Thursday – WA State is slowly opening back up. Traffic is increasing. Almost 15% unemployment rate in the US. Truly staggering.
Wednesday – another long day. Work, calls, lunch, calls, dinner, running Zoom call for the local Dems. Looks like online meetings are going to be a thing throughout the summer at least.
Tuesday – 250k deaths globally. US is arguing around models, lockdown and what next. French re-testing shows a positive COVID-19 test in late December.
Monday – I added the weeks. This is Week 9 of working from home, social distancing and isolation.
The daily routine is pretty similar for the work week; get up, coffee, breakfast, talk to the kids. They do school work (Teams, writing, exam prep) and I work in my office. I run a daily team stand up at 0930 daily which is informal scrum-like: what did you do last, what are you doing today, what do you need help on. Communications is a tad scattered with email, Skype for Business (yes, old), Slack and TFS/ADO comments. I’ve been trying to do informal “tune of the day” in a non-work, social Slack channel for about 8 weeks. Friday afternoon is voluntary team Happy Hour, turn up in Slack with video and a beverage.
I’ve noted that the informal drive-by questions have all turned into 30 minute calls. It’s back-to-back calls most days – so there’s some discipline needed to block out time.
Local and global coverage for future reference.
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