Category Archives: Travel

COVID-19 and Temperature Checks

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I see a lot of companies starting to “open up” during our running COVID-19 pandemic. Right at the top, almost invariably I find the line item that, paraphrased “All employees are temperature checked before they start work.” and then it goes on and on from there.

I think it is worthwhile to start a conversation to illuminate understanding on what temperature checks really are. They are not quickie medical tests to determine if someone is infected or not with COVID-19. They are simply a very easy diagnostic tool to isolate vectors of COVID-19 transmission. Remember, that COVID-19 can infect you without your knowledge, it can replicate in your body without your knowledge, and by the time your immune system calls for a fever, to begin work on fighting the infection, COVID-19 has already been in your system and active and spreading the entire time, back to a standard period of about two weeks.

What temperature checks that fail do, is show you that you have a vector in your midst. Save your bus fare, because when someone is showing a temperature elevation they have been sick for at least a week if not two. These people should be interviewed to see where they have been so that those who have come in contact with them can be tested and quarantined.

So, while companies want to re-open because of economic pressure, which I do fully understand, a temperature check, a good thing to do mind you, is pretty much just identifying a bomb that has been slowly going off for two weeks. It is not testing, it is not contact tracing, and it is not quarantine. You haven’t found a sick person as much as you have found a Typhoid Mary or a Typhoid Marv.

We need to test everyone. We need a vaccine. We need masks, hand-washing, and social distancing. Everything else is just a carefully monogrammed pillow invitation for COVID-19 to spread and kill more people.

The Future of Power?

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The California PG&E outage is a clear note about what happens when you ignore your infrastructure and you don’t have a regular preventative maintenance schedule. PM can cost a lot, but as we see in California, does it really?

I started wondering about alternatives to high tension power lines in California. You couldn’t really bury any of it, with so many quakes, maybe. So what else? Microwave transmission? Maybe make it auto-aiming so if there is a quake and the tower moves a little, it can reacquire the source faster? Or perhaps spread out the generation stations, like solar reflector installations, to distribute the load and increase the production rate…

But then these ideas lead me to truly knackers ideas. If you are going to go this far, why not just also install immense Tesla coils and then outfit cars with wireless AC receivers and then the entire automobile fleet can be electric and not need charging, since you can skip batteries, it’s much easier and cheaper.

But if we did — then we might be able to use addressable frequencies per vehicle or overlay a data stream on top of the power itself, so a car that did a hit and run or is involved in an OJ chase could be remotely turned off. But man, with enough coils dotting the landscape, powered by solar reflector stations you could drive from coast to coast with ease. We could possibly make covered tunneled roadways and then increase the speed, then automate the entire thing so after you get past human reaction limits, your car can accelerate to a comfy cruising speed of 350mph or higher.

I want to trade an immense battery bank for honeycombed graphene and kevlar car bodies so I’m traveling safely even if I impact at ridiculously high speeds. Or I want a car that automatically fills with a gassy rubber filler and ejects the passenger compartment upon a catastrophic impact event, like we have with fighter jet ejection systems. And an adorable theme-able packed parachute, maybe Hello Kitty? 😉

But an entire truck fleet that is automated and powered by solar reflector stations and tesla coils. Zero emissions. Poof, just like that. I suppose I like solar reflectors more because they mean business. Plus you could put the parabolic mirrors on gantries say twenty feet up, and then have open pasture underneath for cows, chickens, and sheep. Or grow shade-happy crops?

These power stations might, if there are enough of them, raise the albedo of the local area and then you nip greenhouse effect at the beginning of the cycle. You’re channeling the incoming solar radiation elsewhere. It isn’t heating up water or pavement or farmland. It’s being soaked up by hungry devices like trucks and cars and trains.

I sort of wonder what an airplane with a wireless AC box would look like? Different jet technology, based on electrics not on jet fuel. And the tons of carbon saved. You could replace the jet fuel with new safety equipment, like foam bursters and ejection systems in case of some sort of failure in the air. The plane just falls apart, the cabin fills with sticky goop, and it parachutes to earth safely.

We would be free of oil completely. It would rewrite the entire narrative.

Nowhere To Go

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I sat at home, looking outside the big picture window as tiny flakes of snow fell from the slate sky and thought about my day. Where to go? To go? Lunch? Where?

Then I got over it. There is nowhere to go. There are no destinations out there where I could find anything that I want. What I want is lost to the past. Again I find myself fondly recalling “The Spot” coffeehouse in Buffalo. It was immense, comfy couches and chairs, and a central ebony bar where you could order any beverage as long as it was tea or coffee based. That’s where I want to go. So of to Yelp to see what is available locally.

Give me a break. Everything is either in run down factory space, which means derelict paper plant shipping skids repurposed into shops, with benches and uncomfortable seating arrangements, with expensive blown out menus — or a chain. Chains serve a purpose but they are not, and never will be, destinations. They are locations of opportunity.

So, lunch at home. Entertainment at home. Everything is here, why would I leave? So I’m all dressed up and have nowhere to go. And the key is to make peace with that. To make peace with the inaccessible past. To let it go and accept the boring and dull crapscape before me.

Thank goodness I can cook for myself! I’d be lost otherwise. The only reason to leave will be to fetch Scott at 5pm. That’s it.

Boeing as Microsoft

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https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/boeing-sold-safety-feature-that-could-have-prevented-737-max-crashes-as-an-option/

Ars wrote an article about the 737 Max aircrafts safety system gap. Boeing made a key function for safety an expensive add-on. God, that smells like a Microsoft joint, doesn’t it? Hahahahahaha. Make your flight choices clear when you buy tickets: I don’t want to fly on Boeing aircraft.

And then, in related news, a touch of quid pro quo between Nikki Hayley and Boeing, too. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/nikki-haley-nominated-for-board-seat-at-boeing/

Hilarious.

C2E2 Convention

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The time is right again, the stars are in alignment and the Great Lake has receded to reveal the Convention Center of the Old Ones, the Display Space of the Insane Damned, McCormick Place in Chicago Illinois! Tentacle monsters, inexplicable seaweed tresses, and the definite sense that maybe Jim Butcher used the entire building as inspiration for the Harry Dresden stories.

We have purchased snack foods and purified water supplies. Healthy snacks with an eye to fiber and protein that we can carry with us on our travels without having to purchase an $8 cuppa coffee or a $17 hot dog or a $25 dollar slice of microwaved pizza. We can sit down and enjoy our snacks in the places reserved for buying patrons and enjoy when frustrated concessioners make their precious frowny faces at us as we enjoy our own treats.

I probably have enough for a two week adventure, and that’s okay. It’s all shelf stable and not going anywhere, and it’s all good for me anyhow, so I can drag anything to work and use it to battle low blood sugar hangries.

The cat sitter is set. I have to get a few more cans of food for Ysy, that’s tomorrow during lunch. Then we will be off for a cavalcade of sitting and watching and enjoying as geeks, dorks, and nerds celebrate pop culture, comic books, and social and economic planetary domination over the uninteresting residuals of the species.

We’re all judging you. With our little plastic wrapped booklets of artwork and our little trollies full of collectibles worth more than your entire educational experiences combined. Then we’ll store all of it in perfectly airless preservation solutions until we remember much later that we have any of it and how much is stacked up…?

And we will laugh, privately, and amusingly while the residuals go out to buy diapers and formula.

New York City Boy

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Tonight’s dreams were sponsored by a blend of La La Land, a free ranging musical where strange behavior and boundless physical endurance meet a totally romanticized New York City where there is traffic where traffic is romantic and piers providing perfect picturesque vistas of the cityscape that obviously do not exist. Complete with the background orchestra that provides the structure for the dancing, running, and singing. And nobody is a fat tubby bitch who runs out of gas in the first ten minutes and can’t get past midtown without an oxygen tank and a blintz. Oy Gevalt.

Mercury Retrograde!

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If you work in IT, have anything at all to do with technology, you should be aware of these two dates and times:

Mercury goes Retrograde in Pisces (29o 39″) on March 5, 2019, at 6:19 pm Universal Time, 2:19 pm EDT and 11:19 am PDT.

The Direct Station occurs in Pisces  (16o 06″) on March 28, 2019, at 1:59 pm Universal Time, 10:59 am EDT and 7:59 am PDT.

It is coming up for us on the Eastern Time Zone, in just a few minutes. After that, everything will be impossible, bonkers, or unbearably loopy for about four weeks.

You have been warned!