maunderings of a meandering mind

I tested positive for Covid this afternoon.

I haven't been as rigorously careful as I possibly could, but I'd be surprised if I'm not in the top 10%: my CDC card is full-up, plus one booster (and I've asked medial providers I was seeing for some other reason at least a dozen times about the latest (Omicron-targeting) booster, all of which were out). I've complied with all the social distancing protocols and continue to wear a mask whenever I go shopping (or really pretty much anywhere but at home or in my car).

Of course I've always understood that all those things were just about improving my odds, and there was no beating that without becoming the boy in the plastic bubble. (And throughout the pandemic I've raged under my breath at people who've failed to attain even the rudimentary numeracy necessary to understand that.) But in the last few months I'd let myself imagine the pandemic was going to run its course and Covid become merely endemic without my contracting it. That, given that by twenty years ago I'd already survived an average lifetime's allotment of medical problems, maybe the gods were going to cut me a break on this one. But of course life isn't fair.

I've been largely avoiding the news for most of the past three years for the sake of my sanity. But I went to the BBC this morning because of the Google doodle on the web's 30^th birthday. And while there remains plenty wrong with the world, I also found a trifecta of stories to feel good about:

A heartwarming family story, featuring a mother hugging her son

A Spanish woman freaked out when her (then) daughter came out to her as trans. But seeing mother and son hug today, you wouldn't know it.

The way the story is structured, we first see the mother today, loving and supportive of her child. Only then do we learn it was not always thus.

I've had trans friends — for that matter, gay and lesbian friends — whose parents never did come around. Which would have heightened my reaction to Hugo's mother's story regardless. But structuring it as they did makes watching mother and son hug now all the more poignant.

Good government — in Italy‽

Many years as a news-junkie conditioned me to expect that "Italy" in a headline would lead me to a story of government malfeasance — or, occasionally, of someone in Italian government who was trying to actually do their job being blown up in their car. And much of my reason for avoiding the news since the Brexit vote and America's descent into Trumpery is the extent to which news out of what used to be two of the world's most admired countries has come to resemble what I expect out of Italy. So I took it as a cheering (albeit sadly ironic) turning-of-the-tables to see a headline about government actually governing come out of Italy:

Italy bans unvaccinated children from school

Imagine that: a government faced with mass stupidity refusing to coddle the idiots and let them place innocent people in danger.

MIT alum and Ivy-league-grad partner found company in Brooklyn

Does anyone know Janet Lieberman (Course II, '07)? She and her partner Alex Fine (Columbia; Psych) founded a company in Brooklyn to bring well-engineered products to an ill-served market niche.

Which would totally be a dog-bites-man story were it about two young men rather than two young women — and were their market niche something other than well-engineered sex toys designed by women, for women.

The BBC put up a video about them and their company them that's pretty much a straight startup profile. The reporting is forthright and tasteful — both marks it would have been easy to miss. And the video is almost entirely free from snickering — the sole exception being when the Ivy founder, Alex, cracks up while delivering a remark directly to camera:

There was a hole in the market, and we just penetrated it.
Yes, we did.

I don't know Ms Fine, of course. But something — maybe just the glint in her eye as she gives up on suppressing her grin — tells me the remark came to her spontaneously during the interview. And that she, like many of my friends, engages in wordplay at a sufficiently high level that, had she come up with such an excellent line beforehand, she'd have steeled herself to deliver it totally deadpan.

I continue to lose weight — and continue to be astounded. Two weeks ago I finally decided it was real and I wasn't really at risk of embarrassing myself half to death by posting about it and then gaining half of it back the next week. Last week I was down another 1.8 kg. Which I decided not to post about it because I know better than to get too excited about movement either direction over any one week. Today I'm down another 1.2 kg.

-15 kg in 12 weeks: I think that counts as a trend.

Today I weigh 130 kg. Hardly healthy — but the least I've weighed since 2011, maybe two years into what I now know would turn out be roughly a decade of backsliding from my post-stroke weight loss.

It continues to mystify me, to feel in some ways more like something that's happening to me than something I'm doing: I don't feel deprived; I'm not struggling with temptation or giving any thought at all to portion control or any of the other apparatus of dieting. But at this point I think it's reasonable to say I've turned a corner. And okay to feel good about it.

Ten weeks ago today, I weighed first thing in the morning, swore under my breath, and muttered something to myself along the lines of "I've got to get serious about this before it kills me."

That was probably the hundredth time I've enacted that little scenario in the last few years. But this time it took. As of this morning, I've lost 12 kg in the past ten weeks.

I'm having a hell of a time deciding what to write here. The first time I sat down to write this post, it started four weeks ago today.... The past three years have left me hugely suspicious of anything that looks like good news. But whatever words I come up with to appease the gods lest they smite me for hubris, a part of me is going to expect that when I step outside after posting this, that a piano is going to land on my head. So given that my fate is orthogonal to what I write here, this may as well be it.

I love Adam Savage not least for his unabashed nerdiness — and his infectious enthusiasm for other nerds and their work.

Barnaby Dixon is a stop-motion animator turned puppeteer, who's devised his own puppet techne. Which is interesting in its own right, and doubly so for what it lets him achieve artistically.

In a video posted earlier today, Barnaby and some of his puppets visit Adam in his shop. And in the ensuing discussion of Barnaby's techniques and the art he makes with them, Adam's enthusiasm gets turned up to 11. The video is joy to watch.

"Adam Savage Meets Barnaby Dixon's Puppets!" (Watch on YouTube)

I just got off an hour-long phone with my surgeon's nurse, discussing the stuff I need to do in preparation for my carpel-tunnel surgery Tues. In which I learned something I had not anticipated: There needs to be someone accompanying me home. And I have to let them know the day before who that will be. (I wasn't expecting to drive myself home: I'm going to be anesthetized. But I was figuring on just calling a Lyft. But they're not okay with that: they'll only discharge me into the care of someone who'll make sure I get home.)

So: if anyone would be able to pick me up at Beth Israel Needham sometime Tues, I'd be most grateful. (They don't do operating room scheduling until the day before: so "Tuesday after 10 am; before 7 pm" is the best I can do til sometime Monday afternoon.) If you're willing but don't drive, we can work make that work: The person they discharge me to doesn't have to drive me home: Just accompany me home.

I wonder if AI is good enough at this point that organizations could offer a public bug reporting facility to their customers, and rely on an AI to bring only those reporting something real to a human's attention?

What brings this to mind is a minor — it probably started life as a typo — data bug I came upon today. The interesting thing about it being that I stumbled upon it in Amazon's data, where I barely noticed it. But then I went to Google Play to check their price — and they had the exact same data bug. Which reveals a detail about how both companies populate their public product databases that they might have preferred to keep private. (Or might not — but it seems to me a company would prefer not to say "we populate our store inventory with regular data dumps from foo, then apply our pricing algorithm and publish it.")

The bug, if you're interested: I was watching a Youtube video of a conference presentation, the speaker showed a slide that intrigued me, captioned with a barely legible credit: Gary Gruver. So I Googled the guy, and found my way to an Amazon page for a book Amazon called — in both in the headline on the page and (sans particles) the Amazon URL — Start and Scaling Devops in the Enterprise. But on the accompanying photo of the book's cover, the title is Starting and Scaling Devops in the Enterprise (emphasis added). At some point in the past few years I stopped dismissing books and articles out of hand for having "enterprise" in the title, and I (for probably no good reason) feel less trapped buying an e-book from Google than Amazon, so I thought I'd see what Google was charging. And found the exact same typo, with the same photo of the cover and the same variant in the URL.

( Screencaps behind the cut )

Behind the cut is a screencap from a Youtube video called 878: A Tour of Viking Britain. ( The North Sea in the 9th-Century )

I have an excelent 1.5ℓ coffee pitcher: It will keep a four-to-six person team-meeting in hot coffee for an hour — or two people working on a project for a half-day. But when it's only me, it's just too much. 1.5ℓ isn't necessarily more coffee than I want in a day. But it's definitely more than I should. And after five or six hours, most of it more than half-empty, it's lukewarm.

I was hoping the people who make it sell a smaller one as well. But if they do, my Google-fu has failed to find any sign of it. So if anyone knows of a good < 1ℓ coffee pitcher, please tell me about it.

Thanks in advance!

Do any of you have an informed view on the relative merits of DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, et al? It's close to ten years since I looked into them in any detail; ISTR deciding at the time that none was significantly better or worse than the others. (Though I'm also fairly sure the decision I made then — to use DD-WRT — had a more substantive basis than just a dice-roll.)

Now I'm looking to set up a NAT with USB tethering from my Pixel as its upstream. Googling didn't find me any good leads for doing this with DD-WRT, but several discussions of doing it with OpenWRT. So I installed OpenWRT on a Cisco/Linksys E4200, with one of its switch ports connected to my MacBook Air via a USB_Ethernet adapter. (And with that and power as the only cables connected to it.) The E4200 came up just fine, giving my Mac a DHCP address in 192.168.1/24, and with the GUI as described in the OpenWRT setup docs. But when I rebooted it after a very little basic configuration (essentially just setting a root password and pasting an ssh public key in), my Mac came up with a self-assigned IP (i.e. one in 169.254.0.0/16).

I've now installed OpenWRT on the E4200 twice with the same results. So before I try to wrestle that into submission, I figured it would be worth while to run this by you all and see what you say.