Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I'm in Los Angeles Thursday afternoon through Sunday this week to work a trade show. After setup yesterday today was Day 1 of the show itself.

I began the day early, having woken up around 4am then sleeping fitfully until about 6 before deciding, "Screw it, I'm up." I split my time between personal web surfing and working to calm a few of urgent issues with some customers & sales prospects. I also created a few intro slides for the workshop I'd give later in the day before taking a shower and dressing. Breakfast? I nibbled on a protein bar and drank a $5 bottle of soda while crafting slides.

Making the Workshop Work

The workshop I was teaching didn't start until 10, so around 8:45 I went to the show floor to check on my colleagues getting ready for booth duty. I thought then I might catch the opening keynote at 9, but just as it was due to start my co-presenter for the workshop popped in and warned me that he'd tried working the first exercise 3 times this morning and it failed. "Shit!" I thought to myself as I suggested we go to our workshop room to debug the failing system without distractions.

Good news/bad news: My coworker's problem was operator error. He made a rookie mistake— and at this point, after supposedly helping deliver variations of this workshop for two years, he ought to know better.

Workshop attendees started arriving early. We had 3 students already 10 minutes before the start of our period. Great! Right? But those were the only 3 students we got. I made the best out of it by making the seminar very interactive, taking lots of questions and sharing lots of colorful stories. ...Colorful stories about devops, that is.

The workshop schedule was 10-1, giving us our lunch break late. The conference team put out the lunch spread at 11:30. One student asked if we could break at 12, grab some food before it all disappeared, and come back to eat while we finished the class. "Sure," I said, thinking that lunch wouldn't be amiss. But by 12 the food was already pretty well picked over. I grabbed a snack and figured that'd have to tie me over to dinner.

We wrapped the workshop at 1:30. One of the students had left early but the other two were really pleased. I wish like hell we could get bigger crowds for these; at this level they're not even close to worth the effort.

On the Show Floor

By 1:45 I was on the show floor helping staff our booths. Yes, booths plural. There are two shows running together. One booth had all 3 of us technical people assigned to it while the other had none. That was absurd, so I unilaterally reassigned myself to the booth with nobody technical. Everybody else there, struggling to answer questions deeper than "What is your company?" was really happy about that.

The thing is, though, probing questions from attendees were extremely few and far between. Here's the typical dialogue I had with attendees at our booth:

"Hi, can I get this free piece of swag?"

"Sure. Hey, what do you know about [my company name]?"

"Nothing."

"Well, have you heard of [very common open source tool we're based on]?"

"No. What's that?"

"I'd be happy to tell you about it. But first tell me what your role is on a software team."

"I don't work in software."

I. Don't. Work. In. Software?? This is a devops conference. It's all about creating & delivering better software. Who's here that doesn't work in software?? Apparently: a) Jobless people. b) Kids. Yes, there are kid here. No, I don't mean "kids" as in people who look like they're under 35, I mean literal 12 year olds. Apparently the conference organizers figured the way to increase attendance of working parents was to let them bring their kids for free.

The Dumbest Booth Conversation Yet

The weirdest conversation I had wasn't with a child, though. It was with an adult who was totally clueless about the conference.

"Do you work for Linux?" she asked.

"Pardon me?"

"The show has 'Linux' in its name. I figure you all must work for them."

I won't relate the rest of the converastion. It didn't get any smarter from there. I'm not sure what she was doing at the show. Did she come to the wrong hotel by mistake? Was she here just to scam the free food? ...Because, let's be honest, the food was crap— not worth going any distance out of your way for!

Out of Energy this Evening

The show was scheduled 'til 6pm today. Attendees thinned out after 3. I figure that's because people who actually live in LA didn't want to get stuck in its infamous traffic during rush hour. By 5 many of our peers were shutting down their booths for the day. We started doing the same. By 5:30 a conference organizer came by and told us to leave for the day as soon as we were ready. One of our neighbors was already gone by then, their booth looking like it was ransacked.

After 6 my colleagues were debating where to go for dinner. I had a pretty good quorum aligned to the idea of "Somewhere comfortable, with good food, not too expensive, and not far away." Then one of my colleagues proposed, "Let's just eat at the hotel restaurant!" Oookay, that's definitely not far away, but it fails on "good food" and "not too expensive". It's hotel chain branded pap, the same they serve at airport hotels in the midwest, except here it's at airport prices. Meaning, a bland dinner is $40-55 before adding sides, drinks, tax, and tip.

I know my company's finance team throws a fit if meals are over expense guidelines— guidelines which, BTW, are $35 for dinner— so I opted not to eat bland food I might have to pay half of out of pocket. I walked 3 blocks down the street for pizza and a few glasses of beer. I ate my fill for less than $25.

It wasn't just money and avoiding arguments with accountants that sent me out on my own for dinner. I was so out of energy I didn't care to sit down at a big table with colleagues. I ate by myself, happy to not have to talk to anyone, and I'm now back up in my room, happy not even to have to see anyone. I'll need the recharge to be ready for 8 hours on the show floor tomorrow.

"It's Twosday!" as numerous news articles and sales advertisements tell me today. "The numbers in the date are all twos." And, "The date is the same no matter where in the world you are," some add.

Oookay, let's look at that. In the US we write 02-22-2022; month-day-year. Uh, there a few non-twos are in there.

And in Europe the date would be written 22-02-2022. As anyone who's ever messed up writing their SSN or bank account number can tell you, 02-22-2022 and 22-02-2022 are not the same sequence of numbers. The third option for date format, year-month-day 2022-02-22 is also not the same string of numbers.

So, 0-for-2 on "Twosday" claims. Any other stupid-cute ideas mainstream media writers who apparently failed 2nd grade math (see what I did there? 😅) would like to share?

I learned through my network today that a former colleague of mine died of Covid-19 yesterday. My sympathy for his wife and daughter (age 22) is tempered by my frustration with him for his poor choices. He was a Coronavirus denier. He refused to get vaccinated. He skirted public health regulations, like mask wearing requirements, every chance he could get. "The left are in hysterics about Coronavirus, it's no worse than the flu," he believed. "We've got to just live our lives."

Well, he lived his life. He lived it to an untimely, avoidable death.

Two weeks ago I wrote Shutdowns Are Here, Planned Or Not. Contrary to public officials and talking heads assuring us "This is not like March 2020" and thus no shutdown measures are necessary, unplanned shutdowns have continued to spread. The huge number of recent Covid cases means a lot of people are sick and unable to work. In addition there's a knock-on effect of people who've been exposed needing to quarantine and thus being unable to work in-person jobs.

There's an old saying, "A failure to plan is a plan to fail." The impact of the failure here is a cascade of unplanned last-minute cancellations upending people's schedules and causing chaos. We've seen the impact in everything from the flight-cancellation mess around the holidays, to the 1000s of motorists stranded on I-95 in Virginia (too many snow plow operators were out sick to keep even this #1 most important artery in the region cleared), to the chaos in school systems across the country as they try to resume after winter break.

I've minimized my personal level of chaos the past few weeks by taking a "We're in a shutdown" stance myself. That's also minimized my risk of exposure to disease. Practicing voluntary shutdown is frustrating, though. It feels like April 2020 all over again— except it shouldn't have to be like this.

Trouble Seeing My Doctor

Recently, though, I have gotten hit by one of the unplanned emergency shutdowns: my doctor's office! I've been trying to schedule an ordinary followup appointment. (I have a prescription drug that's not producing the desired result, and I want to discuss a better treatment plan.) Last week my appointment got rescheduled three times due to doctors suddenly becoming unavailable for the whole day. Early this morning I got a note that my appointment today was canceled because the whole office is closed. And apparently will be closed for a few days now. Can you say, "Covid-19 cases?" Nobody there admits to that, but it's pretty obvious from what's happening.

At the moment I've rescheduled to a telemedicine appointment Wednesday. The doctor is only taking telemedicine appointments for the next 2 weeks. That sure sounds like she's having to quarantine! Again, though, nobody's admitting that. I'll see on Wednesday if she's able to help me adequately or if she's way less than 100% because of "Covid Brain". 😨

It's in the news this evening that the US has passed 800,000 deaths from Coronavirus. I clicked through a few articles and went to one of my favorite data sources to learn more, and... it's not pretty. It's pretty sad, actually. The grim milestone of 800k dead is only the start of the sad story.

If I was going to distill this sad story into a one-sentence plot synopsis, it would be "Despite the US rolling out vaccines a year ago and achieving widespread free availability 8 months ago, the Coronavirus has continued to spread even more rapidly than before because 'Covidiots' don't take it seriously."

A visit over to The New York Times' "Coronavirus in the U.S." page shows that while the new case rate has come down from its January high it spiked up again in August-September and remains high.


I've highlight 2 points in the chart. On January 11 the 7-day average hit a high of over 250,000 new cases daily. By then vaccinations had already begun though their availability was limited to the elderly and sickest at first. The rate drops steeply for the next few months. That reflects a combination of the broadening vaccine availability, distance in time from holiday gatherings that spread the virus, and a move toward more outdoors activities rather than indoor in spring and summer.

The second point I highlighted is September 2, when a summer surge topped off with a daily average over 164,000 new cases. As a raw number this is lower than the Jan 11 figure but it's actually worse in a way because by then a majority of Americans had been vaccinated. Recent data show the unvaccinated contract Covid-19 at 5x the rate of the vaccinated and die at 13x the rate (ibid).

Recent infection rates aren't as bad 4 months ago, but it's worth noting recent figures are still largely driven by the Delta variant. The Omicron variant isn't yet a majority of the cases— and definitely not a majority of the recent deaths— yet. The worst of it could be yet to come.

And what about deaths? Mostly what I've shared here is case rates. Yes, Covid-19 deaths continue to be a sad fact. ...Especially sad because most of them are avoidable. Covid-19 deaths passed 400,000 in the US in January. That means they've doubled in the second year of the pandemic, after the vaccine started rolling out. Net-net it's like we're not even trying. And Covid-19 deaths reported yesterday were 1,276 (ibid). Even with some 60% of all US residents vaccinated that continues to be the equivalent of a 9/11 tragedy every 3 days.

Today I scheduled my Covid-19 booster shot. I'm pretty much on the verge of 6 months since getting my 2nd Pfizer vaccine dose, and I match the conditions approved by the FDA and CDC for getting a booster right now. Thankfully the CVS pharmacy website has been fixed so I didn't technically have to lie (see previous link) to get an appointment. And I don't have to travel over 100 miles for it, either! I'll get my booster shot at a clinic a few miles away on Monday just before lunchtime.

There's irony in the fact I've scheduled my third shot just as Covid-19 finished ripping through part of my family that dithered and made excuses not to get their first shots. Some of us boarded the clue train right away; others don't get it even when hit in the face with a clue-by-4. Well, I'd like to these relatives when I travel for Thanksgiving— but it's got to be safe. Getting a booster this week sets me up for being as safe as I can in visiting Head-in-the-sand America 6 weeks from now.

Olympic Peninsula Travelog #21
Back Home - Mon, 6 Sep 2021. 10pm.

Whew. It's been another busy. Every day of this long weekend trip to Washington's Olympic Peninsula has been a long one, so why not the last, too? Here's a recap:

One More Hike

We squeezed in one more hike in the a.m. hours today, and it was a good one. See my previous blogs, Hiking to Sunrise Point and To Klahhane Ridge and Back.

An awesome thing about hiking today was that we finally had clear weather. Yes, after 3 days of gloom and occasional rain, the skies clear up just before we have to head home. Mother Nature's a basic bitch.

We finished up the hike earlier than I predicted. 1pm was the "gotta roll" deadline I planned for when we needed to start driving back toward the airport, but we were packed and ready to drive at 12:15. We figured that gave us time for a quick lunch stop along the way instead of eating protein bars in the car and waiting until near dinnertime at the airport. Except....

To Live or Let Dine

Trying to find a quick service restaurant to eat at became a chore. First we crossed off the list the places one of us disliked. Then we crossed off the list places that had savage reviews on Yelp. Then, when there were only a few left on the list, we found that they all had their dining rooms closed. "Due To County Vaccine Requirement", they posted. Huh?

There's no county vaccine requirement I had seen any evidence of elsewhere in the county. Nobody was checking for vaccination cards; that's not a thing there. And indeed most restaurants weren't even enforcing mask requirements— for customers or staff cooking & serving the food! These closures and signs struck me as political spite, local business owners so incensed that there are any Covid-19 safety measure in place that they'd rather cut off their own nose to spite the face by closing their dining rooms and turning business away.

Ultimately we wound up at a gas station convenience store with a deli. I got a fresh sandwich, Hawk got a microwave burrito, and we ate at a picnic table outside. Oh, and inside... the staff weren't all wearing masks and most of the customers weren't wearing masks either, despite prominent signs on the door stating "MASKS ARE REQUIRED".

Hurry Up and Wait

Having a few false starts at finding lunch didn't put us behind schedule. We ate quickly outside the convenience store and got back on the road. What did cost us were two traffic snarls. In one small-town area traffic moved at a crawl for miles. We lost at least 20 minutes. When we got through it there was no accident, no construction, no lane closure, etc.; just a bridge that apparently people were afraid to drive over without slowing down to a crawl. 🙄 Another section, in Tacoma, was a classic 7-lanes-merge-down-to-4 on a holiday weekend situation.

These delays didn't make us late.... I had planned the schedule to allow for small delays. That's part of my travel expertise— knowing that "unexpected" delays must be expected and thus included in time planning. Thus we weren't late as we rolled up to the airport, but we'd lost all buffer in the schedule for further delays.

Fortunately the only delay at that point was our flight itself. It was 10-15 minutes behind.

Et tu, Uber?

The flight from SEA back to SJC is about 2 hours. I slept for the second half of it. I half sleep-walked through the airport shuffle in SJC of exiting the aircraft, walking through the terminal, and waiting in baggage claim. By the time we had bags in hand it was 8:30pm and I was awake again. But then the next delay came: car services.

Hawk tried Lyft first. They wanted over $50 to take us home and said it'd be 30 minutes before a driver would even pick us up. $50 is about what it would cost to hire a traditional taxi, including a good tip for the driver. I flipped open my Uber app to see if their offer was any better. Their price came in a bit lower, about $42, and said a driver was 7-10 minutes away. We spent a few minutes comparing the apps, watching prices fluctuate over $50 and back down closer to $40. There was essentially some kind of surge going on... weird, because it wasn't even yet 9pm and there weren't that many people at the airport trying to hail rides.

After a few minutes of watching prices Hawk clicked through for a ride. The driver arrived about 8 minutes later, in a clean and well maintained car, and was very polite. That's why we prefer Lyft/Uber even when the prices are not significantly cheaper than traditional taxis— the driver have clean, new-ish cars, don't drive like they're trying to kill us, and are generally very polite. The driver even helped us with our luggage without being asked!

Back Home, and 7½ Days Later

We arrived home a bit after 9pm. It was 30 minutes later than we'd hoped but still early enough in the evening for us to unpack our bags, shower, and wind down before going to bed.

Edit: Well, we only unpacked some of our bags Monday night. The rest took until Tuesday or Wednesday to get to. And these blogs have taken now 7½ days to catch up on. But now the trip— and its story— are done.

In my previous blog, about how health mandates are at an all-time low even as Covid rates have risen back to dangerous levels across most of the US, I attributed the lack of precautions to too many people just not giving a fuck anymore. I'd like to expand on that. There are actually two kinds of people who've stopped giving a fuck. 😆

On the one hand are the fully vaccinated. The roughly 55% of us in the US who've had a full course of inoculation are less concerned now about getting sick. The vaccine gives us up to 95% immunity against contracting Covid, according to scientific studies last year, and around 99% resistance to severe enough sickness to land us in the hospital. Of course, preliminary data about the newer Delta variant suggests a lower effectiveness, so we vaccinated folks do need to be more cautious today than two months ago.

On the other hand are the vaccine rejecters. These are the 30-40% of people in the US who state in polls that they either outright refuse to get vaccinated or consider themselves unlikely to do it. Many of them also think the harms of Coronavirus are exaggerated by a political-media conspiracy. Some think the vaccine itself is part of a Big Brother conspiracy.

Vaccine rejecters make up most of the Covid cases nowadays. That makes sense when you consider that vaccinated people are mostly out of the pool when it comes to sickness. We're one-tenth as likely, or less, to get infected. That actually makes the overall rates even scarier— for the unvaccinated, For the unvaccinated the infection rates are over 2x, close to 3x, the overall average. That means Coronavirus is almost as rampant now as it was at the worst peak of the past 16 months— but only for the unvaccinated. Meanwhile those of us who've gotten our shots are relatively safe. It's a tale of two Americas.

Maine Week Travelog #6
Acadia National Park - Tuesday, 15 Jun 2021, 7pm.

Whoever named things in Acadia National Park had a weak way with words. They used up all the obvious name words like "Sand Beach" for a beach with, well, sand. When it came time to name a pair of knobby hills in the middle of the park all they could think of was Bubbles. So this afternoon we hiked first to South Bubble then North Bubble.



Atop South Bubble is this interesting balanced rock. It is named— wait for it— Bubble Rock. While Hawk and I were content to admire it from various angles, every kid under the age of 20 who was up there with us— and not a few of their parents— immediately took it upon themselves to try to push Bubble Rock off the cliff. It'll be a shame when one of those knuckle-draggers succeeds.



Also at the top of South Bubble is an awesome view south across Jordan Lake and to the Atlantic Ocean beyond. It's hard to see much of the ocean, though, because of the fog layer remaining this afternoon.

Most hiking guides suggest following a loop trail down to the edge of Jordan Lake from this summit and then coming back around toward the parking lot. South Bubble's taller sibling, North Bubble, is given no love. We decided we'd rather visit both bubbles than see a lake up close in the gloom.



The trail to North Bubble is steep. The South Bubble trail was by no means flat, but getting up to North Bubble requires ascending several staircases of natural stone and following blazes across slickrock. That's familiar terrain for us, though. Bare granite trails are all over the pace in the Sierra Nevada range, and we love them.



Views from the top of North Bubble are occluded by trees— perhaps that's why hiking guides give it short shrift— so I've included this photo of Jordan Lake and South Bubble (left edge) from near the top of North Bubble. If it were at the top, South Bubble would seem shorter.

After climbing both bubbles we returned down the trail to our car. Sunset isn't technically for another hour or so, but with the fog layer in the sky it's twilight already. We'll head back into town after this for supper.

I got an email today from Stanford Health Care, one of the providers I signed up with for Coronavirus vaccination. They're ready to schedule my shot! Except... I signed up with them six weeks ago. And in that time I've gotten both shots already.

Shot availability is changing. Six weeks ago shots were hard to find in my area. Almost everyone wanted one. Walk-up clinics were having to turn people away, and scheduled appointments were being snapped up right after they were loaded in the wee hours of the morning. I got my first shot 5 weeks ago by leaning in: searching across multiple providers and being willing to travel 100+ miles for vaccination.

Now supply is exceeding demand. News articles tell of walk-up clinics having leftover doses at the end of each day, even here in the Bay Area. That's been the case longer in other parts of the country where there's significant vaccine hesitancy.

It's not that vaccine manufacturing and delivery have ramped up to super high levels. As far as I can tell those are about the same as a month ago. In fact they're probably actually lower due to safety concerns pausing the J&J vaccine. It's really about the large number of people, over 30% nationwide, who don't want the vaccine (or are playing a misguided wait-and-see shell game). Consider it this way: More than half of everyone 16+ already has at least one shot. That means among the other 50%, the majority don't want it.

The 30% vaccine refusers are not spread evenly around the country. Here in the Bay Area their numbers are lower; that's why shots were hard to find for a long time. On the flip side, if shots were easy to get in your area a month ago— it's not because your state was "doing it right"; it's because your neighbors are Covidiots.