Friday, March 19, 2021

Going For The Jab

      Barring the unforeseen, I'll get my first vaccine shot today.  Watch this space for any signs of mutation -- I can be the canary in this coal mine.

      For the record, I gave up on Donald Trump's GOP quite some time ago (still decades later than I did the Dems), and made my disdain public in the wake of the storming of the U. S. Capitol on 6 January.  I've been a libertarian (small-l variety) since I encountered the idea in Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress when I read it while in High School.  So you can't blame that on the vaccine.

      Internet connectivity is coming and going this morning, as it did all day yesterday,* so I'll stop here.
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* We're on copper back to the local switch, old-fashioned dialtone-and-DC phone service with Internet riding atop it.   AT&T loathes metallic pairs and would love to drop them -- but they can't; they're stuck with them thanks to regulations.  So they maintain the lines only after failure, and hope customers will give up.

5 comments:

Carteach said...

We get our second hit on Saturday. The first was disappointing. No super-powers. Not even a super-habit.

Pigpen51 said...

I had gone back and forth about the idea of the vaccine. I quickly got over any political thoughts of the entire thing, early on. The part of the issue that concerned me was the speed with which they were able to come up with a vaccine, as compared to any other vaccine that normally would take 3-5 years. Then I considered that in all likely hood, the time it took was not only due to extreme cautiousness, but also to political inertia, and bureaucracy.
Considering the actual work time involved with the development of the drug, including reasonable testing, I figured that a bit less than a year, counting the research that was most likely already done for similar products, seems reasonable. So I had decided that eventually I would get the vaccination.
I was scheduled to get it early this week, with my wife. Then she got sick with some URI. She already had a mild case of Covid, with the worst symptoms being extreme fatigue and headache, that carried on after the 2 week period. Last weekend when she began with the respiratory symptoms, we took her to a doc in a box, where they took a covid test, and she learned a couple of days later that it was negative. So today, her doctor told her that she should go back to the Medicenter, to seek further treatment. Which we will do later when she feels a bit more up to it.
She called the Vaccine provider the day we were scheduled and they told her, that even if she just had the URI, she should wait until she was symptom free, since bronchitis is one of the possible side effects of the vaccine, and my wife already has that and doesn't need more problems. I could have had my vaccine the day I was scheduled for it, but I chose to wait and go with her, when she is able to get hers.
At one time, I might have thought of the conspiracy theories that others spout, but I have learned that our government is too incompetent to be able to not only conspire against all of us, but the more people who know things, the harder it is to keep it quiet.

Douglas2 said...

Once upon a time we were led to believe that such copper line systems were engineered for resiliency. That does atrophy, but it takes time and interference to effectively destroy the multiple redundancies.

Summer before last we had a house full of guests during a storm and were just about to start preparing supper when the power failed. "What are we going to do for supper? said one, while another said "I've got no bars on my iPhone, and the internet's down"

They looked at me quizzically as I went to the bookshelf, pulled out a tome of strange thin yellow pages, and used the 'flashlight' function of my otherwise useless mobile phone to assist in finding the right page.

The base-station of the DECT cordless is of course powered by a UPS, and I was pleased both to hear a dial tone and to hear the cheery "hello" after punching in the number of our favorite restaurant. The power failure was merely local, and while the failure of the nearest cell towers was worrying in the "what is the world coming to" sense, we had an enjoyable meal at our first-choice of mealtime backup plan.

I didn't need to reveal the Western Electric 1500 which is cleverly concealed behind the sofa, never in-the-way but always there. I've no idea how much longer I can count on POTS working in storm-related power-failures even when every other system has failed, but so far it has not failed me.

RandyGC said...

Due for my second jab a week from today. Other than a slightly sore arm, no bad effects from the first one. (Pzier)

CINCHOUSE got severe chills a few hours after she got her second, but they were done when she got up the next morning.

Here's hoping you don't have any reactions.

Anonymous said...

Hope you are doing well with the vaccine.

Sorry AT&T is your LEC. Our metro is old Northwestern Bell territory, now CenturyLink. I actually caught them fixing a leaky cable along the street near the TV station last fall. I thought the nitrogen tank chained to the pole up the street was going to remain forever, like I see in other metro areas where the telco won't fix bad cables. Of course, maybe they ran out of dry pairs, and HAD to fix it, but...

We found out early in the pandemic how shitty internet is for a lot of our employees trying to work from home. Worse for the DSL folks on average, but the cable internet folks were also struggling.

I'm spoiled by fiber from a rural co-op telco. They're not perfect, but they are responsive, and they know me and my broadcast background. The 10-year-old battery in the UPS that provides power to the optical network terminal finally died over the winter. I offered to swap the battery for them, and avoid the COVID hassles for them and me. The plant manager said, "we'll do one better and give you a whole new UPS". Sure!