Sunday, March 17, 2024

COVID 2020 to 2024

Almost exactly 4 years ago I wrote about COVID here. You might want to review. One of the salient points is this chart.

American deaths, slightly rounded.
Vietnam    58,300  over 20 years, with peak death rates in the 70's so a low deaths per month rate overall. First real time graphic media coverage of a war, so that might be part of the impact.
Korea            36,500    36 months    1,000/month
WWI           116,000    19 months    6,100/month
WWII          417,000   45 months   9,200/month
Civil War     750,000   48 months  15,600/month
COVID        140,000    5 months   28,000/month (so far, and the number of cases is growing daily. The death rate cannot but rise along with it.) (this was as of March 2020.)
Spanish Flu  675,000  12 months   56,000/month
(As a note, the USA population in 2018 was about 103 million people, so about half of 1 percent of the American population died of Spanish Flu.)

And now, COVID in 2024, as of last week per CID here, is 1.184 MILLION deaths out of a total population of 332 million. Those deaths are the entire population of cities like San Jose, San Diego, or Dallas. All of these are in the top 10 cities ranked by population. Imagine that, one of the biggest cities in America, with everybody dying. Over 4 years that is 24,600/month. 

Or another way to think about it, COVID killed a third of 1 percent of the population, and that's WITH our knowledge base about disease, and the treatments available. And on the flip side, that's WITH the anti-vaxx, anti-mask, anti-public heath measure idiots.

Total hospitalizations is 6.88 MILLION, or 2 percent of the American population were sick enough to go to a hospital. They don't know how many were sick enough to go, but didn't because they couldn't afford it. Or waited too long and died before they got there. 

So far in Canada, according to this government site, there have been 58,643 deaths from COVID. That's the population of St. Alberta, almost the population of Prince George. There were 55 in the last week alone. 

I worked from home mid 2020 to middish 2021, then retired from oil and gas work. I've mostly lost touch with people still working, but the little I do hear is that most office workers are still working at least part time from home. The bosses are trying to nudge the workers back to full time in the office, and there's some push back. During the walk through the +15 a couple weeks ago we noted there weren't many people around, and that was lunchtime on a Tuesday. 

There are still complaints that business can't hire enough people, which is why it takes so long to get stuff done, and why it's so expensive. As a quick digression, many people blame Trudeau for this. Him personally, with malice aforethought, did everything bad over the last couple generations. He personally signed all the CERB cheques that got sent to a bunch of freeloaders. I have heard those very words straight from the lips of cranky old men in the hot tub. I bite my tongue. When they start babbling about Trump I leave, fearing the verbal diarrhea might turn to the fecal version.

Here we are 4 years later. In lots of ways we're back to 'normal'. Before COVID there were a few people wearing masks for whatever reason, and now it's about the same again. Traffic is as bad as ever. I don't go to the malls much, but the parking lots are full. The library is busy. The farmers market we like is busy. Our main supermarket is under active construction, so I don't know if the before/after comparison is fair, but there's still lots of people in it.

And do you know what's really busy? Really, really busy? Hospitals. They are overwhelmed, and it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Wait times are through the roof. All the illnesses and conditions that could be managed with regular care, all those "optional" procedures, all the older people wanting some level of medical care to prevent or delay worse conditions, were deferred or delayed because the hallways were full of people dying of COVID. And now all that deferred treatment is coming home to roost, in a system where the medical professionals have been drained dry over the last 4 years. Many have retired, taken stress leave, or just burned out. And if that wasn't bad enough, Alberta's idiot UCP government chose to pick a fight with the doctors and nurses in an effort to send money to privatized clinics that would benefit Minister Shandro and other buddies of the regime.

That's part of the Conservative mind-set. Defund the public services, then claim they don't work, cherry pick the best parts to be outsourced to their buddies for private profit. Except it doesn't work. Service at the medical labs took an abrupt turn for the worse when privatized. It used to be one could make an appointment for a couple days out, no problem, and urgent tests could often be done the same day. Last time I needed blood work done it was 5 weeks till the first appointment at all, and 6 to get one that was mostly convenient. Even with the scheduling, the appointments were running 45 minutes to an hour late, for a reserved time. Now we're going to have to spend 31.5 million to rescue the lab services from Dynalife. We should get that money from the people that made the decision to hire Dynalife by suing them into bankruptcy. Plus the Dynalife execs.

And some people think it's a good idea to let the UCP strip off a pile of money from the CPP managers, and let their pet investment agency (Aimco) 'manage' it. Or more likely, lose it through politically motivated boondoggles, just like the Heritage Fund. Don't get me started.

Back to COVID. Disease is the scourge of humanity. In many wars disease killed more than the fighting. Disease doesn't care if your cause is noble. Disease doesn't care what god or gods you worship, or don't. A human lifetime ago, if you got infected from any of a nearly infinite number of causes, you had a small chance of fighting it off, but most likely you died. Half the people born didn't make it to 15. It was a pretty grim world. 

We know so much more now. We know our hands are a great disease vector, and washing them with soap and water is a great way to break the chain of infection. It took a long time to convince doctors that going directly from doing an autopsy to a childbirth was a great way to kill mother and child. Some people still don't get it.

It takes a special sort of stupid to believe that the vaccine is worse than the disease. Yes, there are a few people who for various reasons cannot or should not be vaccinated, and an actual medical doctor can provide the appropriate advice. Not a priest or any of their ilk, or a youtuber 'expert'. For most people the downside is a sore arm or drowsiness. Better than dying any day. All the excuses are bullshit. Consult the appropriate medical advice and suck it up. Deniers are the major reason why TB and measles are coming back.

Rust never sleeps, so our infrastructures will fall down if not maintained. 
Disease never sleeps. Our best efforts only make it take a short rest.

Friday, March 15, 2024

TIWATIWIS

No I'm not smoking dope. I'm just finishing my first cup of coffee. I'll explain.

There are many kinds of photographs, done with many different intentions. Some are wonderful, some are not. There is a particular category that I call, There I was, and this is what I saw. (now go back and look at the title again. Are we good?)

Good.

Those of you that have been following along know I go to Red Deer to buy wine kits. Why? It's cheaper. I saved $60 on one kit. We're only buying 3 kits this year, but it adds up, even considering the cost of gas to get there and back. I happen to know that our car will burn 18 L of gas for that trip. Gas is shockingly expensive just now, at $1.49 /L, so $27 for the trip. It's even better when I can pick up all the kits in one trip, but that doesn't always happen. That was about to turn into a digression on oil company profit margins, but I restrained myself.

I sometimes like to take the scenic route, and sometimes my friend Sean comes along, and we both bring our cameras. Yesterday was such a day.

The problem is that this is the yucky season for landscapes. Melting snow and nothing growing doesn't make for good photos. Search light bright sunlight scorching the snow doesn't help. However, it is what it is, and part of the challenge is to find or create nice photos anyways.

I cannot count the number of times I've driven past the signs for Dickson Dam, which creates Gleniffer Lake. I've never been there, and decided that was as good a place as any to check out. After all, what's the worst that could happen?

Which leads back to the title. We got there ok, and wandered around a bit. There wasn't much to see. Unless things change dramatically, there isn't much to see even in summer. We took photos anyways, but they do not even pretend to be anything more than documentary evidence we were there.

1. The spillway from across the river valley, from a viewing area that I think is a teenage hangout for watching the submarine races, given the fast food containers overflowing the garbage bins.


2. Faint shadows on ice.

3. Ice cracks with faint shadows.

4. The water level is way way down.

5.

6. Converting to B&W was the only way to actually see the mountains in the photo.

7.

8. Best photo of the day, Sean working on a composition with the most interesting thing we saw there.


9. That white area in the left foreground? That's Gleniffer beach. Ipanema and Piha have nothing to worry about.

Was the trip a failure? Of course not! After this we zig zagged into Red Deer, got the wine kit, had a nice lunch and drove back, with great conversation along the way. 

To change the topic a bit, one of the things was discussing activities in person with other people, such as shared events, coffee, or lunch, and how much better that is than on-line 'interactions'. 

Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)


Yukon

and a serendipity from 2016.


Film (new) There were some thoughts about the juxtaposition of those wooden seats, at least that's what I think they are, with the towers downtown.


Double Exposure

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

That DST thing, again

Last Sunday was the spring forward part of the fall back cycle. I'm not even working a job these days, and typically don't have to be anywhere in particular at an hour imposed on me, and certainly not an uncivilized hour. And yet, here it is Wednesday afternoon, and I'm still kind of messed up. It feels like I should have just finished coffee and be working on some writing, and yet it's 1:19 in the afternoon. Granted we were up a bit late last night, and I didn't sleep well, so slept in a bit more than usual.

But holy doodle, it seems like I'm running late and I hate that feeling. It reminds me of the time when I was periodically visiting Richmound SK to do software training and data integrity feedback. Richmound isn't the middle of nowhere, but it's well along the way. There are no hotels there or nearby. The closest are in Medicine Hat, about an hours drive away. 

Visits there always had the dance of double checking when DST started or ended. Saskatchewan is sensible in some ways, in that they stay on Central Standard Time year round. So during the summer, visits there only have to account for the hour's travel time. During the rest of the year, it's two hours to be accounted for, with me wanting to push for the later starting time. 

Except the staff at remote locations typically have priorities that do not include training. If they get started on something else, they might not show up. I've even had operators perk up on hearing an alarm during class, and say "Oh shit, XXXX is covering for us, and he doesn't know" and they ran. I didn't see them again.

Going further back, working at the City plant, on a rotating shift. There was no provision for the time change in our schedule or pay. At the appointed hour we would dutifully change all the clocks. During the spring forward it was suddenly an hour later and we would only work 11 hours. The times we turned the clocks back made for a long shift, even if we did take the extra hour as a break.

I wish that Alberta would pick MST and stick with it year round. I think I could cope with doing the DST version year round. The 2021 referendum to go to permanent DST was pretty well evenly split, leaning slightly toward sticking with the current system. I think it should have asked about staying with MST permanently, and I suspect that would have passed. 

A random winter sunset for you.


Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC) And this is it till my next trip.


Yukon

Film (new) Once again, X does not mark the spot.


Double Exposure

Second false spring

There I was, out for a walk in Fish Creek Monday. The headline news is that I didn't fall down, didn't break anything in me or the camera body. All that is good. The paved paths are mostly clear, with some shady sections being completely snow covered, and a few bits being puddles of various sizes. There are reflections to be had in such puddles, which is what interested me. A couple people gave me some strange looks as they walked past.

Some of the paths are essentially a long skinny crappy skating rink between muddy bits. Or maybe muddy bits between crappy skating rinks. The snow has melted enough to turn to ice, sometimes with a faint skim of water on top. On the flat this isn't particularly a problem if one walks carefully. Which I did. 

Hills are a problem. I was exploring one path that went down a steep hill. I watched one kid go tobogganing down on her butt, frantically clutching at trees all the way. Parents were all concerned, but she was all, I'm ok, soaking wet at the bottom and telling parents it was their turn to come down. Which they did, really slowly, clutching at trees, doing a bit of bushwhacking to avoid the ice. I turned around and went back to the stairs that go down another part of that hill. 

I was carrying a film camera, so there are no photos of the adventure. This is from a walk a little while ago; I happen to know that stretch of path is bare and dry now.


I'm not so fond of this time of year. The ice on the rivers is totally unsafe, though I saw a couple daredevils crossing. The paths are a mess. I'm sick of the snow, but there's still lots of it around, and more might fall. There's still a ways to go till actual spring and colour and warmth. In fact we've still got TWO WHOLE FREAKING MONTHS where we could get a major road snarling traffic stopping snowfall. I'll tell you now, if that happens, I'm going to go back to bed.

I saw a couple bees while working the BBQ today, but I don't think they're going to find much to eat. 

Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

Yukon

Film (new)

Film double exposures. More of what I posted on my photo blog last week. It's here if you missed it.



Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Recent Books

Somehow, in the midst of my busy retired life, I'm finding time to take books out of the library, and actually read them. I like having the library app on my phone because every time I come across a book mention that sounds interesting, I can see if the library has it, and put a hold on it. Much as I like browsing the shelves, there is a place for a targeted search. Plus the library I got to most of the time is renovating, and it's nearly impossible to find anything without assistance.


A long time ago in a cutting room far, far away, by Paul Hirsch.

As some of you have guessed, he had something to do with Star Wars. An Oscar for editing, if you hadn't known that. Plus something called Ferris Bueller's Day Off that people rave about. Lots of others. 

This was surprisingly interesting, in that I'd never thought about the details of editing a movie from the bits of film. It's related to photography and writing, in that what you leave out can be as important as what is put in. Order is important. Which frame exactly do you cut on? What is the story and the best way to tell it.

When I think about how complicated it is to make a movie, how many people are involved, and how many moving parts there are, I'm amazed that it gets done at all, let alone sometimes done so well it's breathtaking. And, to be fair, sometimes done so poorly that the people involved don't even want to have their name associated with it. Being honest, it might not even be their fault. Even with a good script, solid actors, competent direction, the execs can screw it all up by arbitrarily deciding it has to be a certain length and damn the plot continuity, or that certain scenes have to be cut because they will offend someone.

At least with photography and most writing, there is one artist. All good writing has an editor, but nobody outside the biz cares who that is. And unless you're a world famous photographer with an entourage of assistants, you find or create the photo setting, decide on camera settings, edit to please yourself, and publish to bask in the 'glory' of Instagram likes, or whatever it is you do with your photos.


The Print by Ansel Adams.

If people know one  photographer's name, it's Ansel Adams. He goes into a lot of detail about the printing process. As in the darkroom printing process. Lots and lots of detail. He makes it sound intimidating. I still want to sign up for a darkroom course.


Borderlands by Mark Vitaris

Drool alert! I've been enraptured by the big skies ever since I drove from Streetsville to Calgary in 1980. People say driving across the prairies is boring, but I loved it. The wide open spaces, the huge and dramatic skies, I can't get enough. And now that I'm carrying a camera around a lot of the time, I've tried to get photos like these. A big empty place, with something interesting, and a wonderful sky. It's harder than it looks.


On the Labrador by Arnold Zageris.
I've never really thought much about Labrador. It was just a rocky east coast. Cold, wet, with more biting insects than in the rest of the world put together. But turns out the scenery is stunning! I'd like to see and photograph it, but this isn't a place for casual tourists. Zageris was committed, with a capital C, to go and get the photos.


Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

Yukon

Film (new)

Saturday, March 2, 2024

February Image of the Month

A bit of a mixed bag for Image of the Month. Mostly it was pretty crappy weather so it was hard to be out. And being honest, I don't think my photographic eye was working very well. I'd look at the image on screen, and remember what it looked like in life, and I was disappointed. 

2nd Runner up 
Driftwood in Glenmore Reservoir on Ultrafine 100. 


1st Runner up
OK, OK, dust spots. I know. But this is part of the series from a +15 ramble with friends, and I explain about the spots. So technically, this isn't the best photo ever. But it evokes associations in me on two levels and that's why it's here. It's one of the few photos I've taken that are more about something, than of that something, at least for me. I hope that's clear.


I'm pretty sure that's not actually clear, so there's going to be what turned out to be the longest digression ever in Image of the Month. Feel free to skip the text and scroll down to IofM. 

I'm not sure how many people outside my family know that my mom's dad was famous in the Fraser Valley for competing in horse drawn plowing competitions. This was way back, on the order of 50 years ago now, and even then it was a dying art. My cousin has a photo done by passing photographer of Grandpa working a plow in almost this exact posture. It took a while but eventually the photo made its way to us. I have a copy but I'd have to scroll through thousands of photos to find it. The original was water damaged and my cousin was going to restore it. I should ask how that's going, but given her life over the last while, that's probably not even on the back burner.

The other association is that this is in the Penn West Plaza. I worked for Penn West (now Obsidian) from 2012 to 2016. I look back at that time and marvel at the whole experience. Some might say I was bad luck for the people around me. I was the sole survivor of the first two teams I was part of. 

I got hired in the first place because me and the team lead were totally sympatico about holding various data sets and subsets in our heads and comparing them via SQL statements, and writing rules to manipulate the data and the relationships therein. She was just about the only person who could follow along with a statement like "starting with X database without the Y add ons, extract things with  characteristics 1, 2, and 3, and then compare that list to the list of similar things generated from another database proposed for addition, we end up with 3 groups, items that overlap and we can thus ignore, items in the original but not in the proposed addition, that we can ignore for now but don't forget about, and items in the proposed addition that are not in our X database, which then is manipulated to to do several re-comparisons to X based on other ID data like serial number, corrected or reformated A numbers, and we end up with work lists that look like this to provide data sufficiently clean to be linked." She would smile and nod, then we could start discussions if it was better to engage the owner of the database proposed for addition and make them clean it up so there were exact matches, or if we wanted to build in transformations that would do the match, and generate work lists for the owner. That team lead and her counterpart on a related team, and their boss were all let go about the time there was an office move, and essentially everybody got lost along the way. One of my regular readers had the fortuitous offer of another job at this exact time.

I found my way up a few floors into the best office of my entire time there. Right next to the manager who had the corner office. That team was migrating data into Maximo, and I was doing the data integrity and building the import spreadsheets. I had fun arguing with the Maximo project managers, and the company management about their fundamental misconceptions about the data. I wasn't popular, but I was right, and they should have asked me first. 

That team all got purged in 2015, leaving me alone. I walked in after hearing about the layoffs on the news as I drove in from a dentists appointment, and nobody knew if I still had a job or not. Turns out I did, and if they had asked me who they should have kept if only one person was it, I would not have said me. I would have said Patricia; she had made a great start on pipelines, and that was the bulk of the remaining difficult work.

They dropped me into another team so I had a manager, and I sort of finished that migration, mainly trying to keep up with corporate divestitures, and finish adding the last pipelines which were last because they had the worst data. If the person now working with that data happens to read this, and is wondering what drugs I was on to import some of those pipeline segments, I got told to shut up and do it. By then I was tired of working for them, and happily let that many times renewed contract expire.

Anyways, every time I walked past this it reminded me of my grandfather and wishing I'd known him better, since in some ways I think I've become somewhat like him as I aged. It also stands for a more innocent time of being a kid shuttling between two farms and being put to work throwing hay bales around. 

Image of the month
A long exposure of a Bow River lagoon on FP4+.



Monday, February 26, 2024

OK, now that that's over with

Regular programming, such as it is, will resume.

There are some people who live manic. There's always something happening, and typically it's happening RIGHT NOW!!! Because they're late. And the next thing is also right now, and the thing after that is much too soon, and often the really, really important thing, which could be tomorrow, might as well be an eternity away, until it's OMFG it's due INSTANTLY. Such people often live in all caps, and I'm sparing you from that. And if you let them suck you into that life, you can confidently expect a heart attack, or stroke, or high blood pressure.

That describes much of the regular work world, and every day I'm happy I'm not in it any more. My major tool of coping was the important urgent matrix, sometimes called the Eisenhower Matrix. There are 4 boxes. The two columns are headed Urgent and Not Urgent. The two columns are Important and Not Important. Figuring out which tasks belong in which box is key to staying sane. 

Keep in mind that the box you put a task in might be considerably different from the box your boss (and their boss), might think it belongs in. Tact, balls of steel, being the only person that can do your job, and not caring if you get fired are, in order, the best tools for helping to explain to your boss why they are wrong about their box assignment.

I sometimes get fixated on a particular thing in my schedule, and want it done and over with. In many cases I dealt first with the thing that has an assigned due date, even if that date might be later than tomorrow. My thinking was that it would probably take longer than expected, and handing it in early gave them less time to change their mind about what they wanted. I learned that it was hard to focus on other things with the deadline task looming. Oddly enough, having multiple deadlines wasn't a problem. I just picked the first one.

So last Friday morning was a medical date that required several days of a restricted diet and an evening chugging 4 litres of an unpleasant fluid. I didn't do much else that week, kind of dreading the whole thing. Most of you probably know what I'm talking about. If you don't, you'll find out soon enough in the great scheme of things. It all went as well as could be expected, and hopefully I'll never have to do that again. No, I didn't watch the movie.

Like I said, now that that's over, back to regular programming. Except the lane swim hours at the pool suck this week, and the last time I went at the current hours, it was a total gong show. I was sharing a lane with 4 other people, and a few times I wasn't sure if there were 5. People were dropping in and out without letting the other people know. It usually only took a couple laps for them to figure out that yes indeed I do swim quite a bit quicker than they did, and to stop at the end of the lane. A couple more laps, and they learned not to stand in the centre of the lane.

I ended up doing 3K all in one go, in just over an hour, mainly because I could never get in the groove, and I had to look at the end of the lane every time to figure out what the other people were going. Good thing I didn't really care about my time. I just wanted to get it in and done.

Non-swim days, mostly, I try to get out for a walk with one of the cameras. Except today is minus teens before windchill, and I can see the breeze. After a few days of nice weather, I'm a softie again. I mean, yesterday I was outside in a T shirt grilling bison burgers.

Some wintery photos for you.






Of the Day
Driftwood (NZ)


Driftwood (BC), with two serendipity images.




Yukon

Film (new) (Acros II) Fish Creek Mallard Point.


Film (old) Last of a film tour of the plant.