Covid and Me

I think I had it.

• I lost my smell for many months
• Brain fog was bad. I was faking that I remembered things people said.
• Pressure in my head. It felt like my head was going to explode.
• Cough that would not go away for a month.
• Joint and bone pain.
• Bad night sweats
• Drop in Oxygen Saturation to 96%
• Over 100 degree fever for many days, some readings at 103 and 104.
• It left me physically feeling weaker.

In mid March, where I work, one of my co-workers got sick. He was sweating, coughing, etc., but…

I want pretty pictures in my code. Not ASCII art, not links to HTML pages or PDFs or Visio diagrams, I want to use my editor to put pictures in my code. I want to be able to draw in a comment block.

A long time ago, in a land far away, assuming Champaign — Urbana is far away, I had a contract with a company called Regency Systems. Regency was a Computer Aided Instruction, CAI, company, that put together training systems for companies. A lot of it was for the airlines, who have heavy re-occurring training requirements. Regency would…

Years ago, my two business partners invested in the SmartThings Kickstarter. After they played with the setup, I ended up with the Smarthub, a couple door sensors, a motion sensor and a light switch. Its pretty cool and I use it as my home security system. The thing its missing is a camera. Enter Presense.

I think many of us have old devices laying around cell phones and tablets laying around that for one reason or another no longer are being actively used. For me, it was my Nexus 5, which seems perfectly usable, its just not being patched anymore…

For me, I am mainly interested in computer malware or viruses, when they are associated with spam email.

In 1998, I started to get my first pieces of spam email. For a while, I was just deleting them, that got too annoying and I wrote some Perl scripts on a mail server that I controlled and thought “Problem Solved.” The spam evolved and I would tinker with my Perl scripts. Then spam evolved more and I had to re-think my Perl scripts. And the spam kept evolving. …

Qubes OS is my favorite new Linux distribution. I have been a *nix user since dinosaur days, starting with a version 7 UNIX PDP-11 that would trash the file system everytime it lost power and a System 3 and later 4.2 BSD based 68010 system, an ISI Optimum, I still have from 1984. I have had a bunch of different favorite Linux distributions, starting with Yggdrasil Linux, and continuing through Red Hat Linux, SUSE, Debian and Ubuntu.

Debian Sid was the first one I used with continuous upgrading and I really liked that but of course there have been those…

Today I was just listening to a security podcast, the CyberJungle, and they were blaming the slow adoption of Android updates on the cellphone carriers. This is a theme I have heard many times, and I’m not sure its entirely true. I think the porting of Android updates might be a generally hard problem. My thoughts on this come from my own Google Fi Nexus 6. I have owned Google branded phones since the Nexus S. I really like the idea of an Android phone without extra carrier software added to it. When Google Fi came out, I signed up…

Fake news is in the news. Today I got an extra dose of it as two friends on the opposite ends of the political spectrum, argued about what was happening. Both accusing each other of listening to “Fake News”. I think we’ve gone a little overboard, but I do like that we are more skeptical of what the news has to tell us. Sometimes, when digging into a problem, I go through a piece of the problem, in my case mostly software, where I look at it and think “How it do I know it does what I think it…

One of my all time favorite science fiction movies is Blade Runner. One of the scenes from the movie, Roy Batty asks Leon — “Did you get your precious photos?”. A lot of the things in my life, I could lose, it would be a bummer, but I would move on. Like Leon, though, I want to keep my precious photos. I would would feel really bad if I lost some of them. I was reminded of this, during Christmas as a relative was upgrading her phone. I asked about her photos, and she said she backs them all up…