Sunday April 19, 2020; 9:40 AM EDT
I find it helpful to ask the question "Is the virus here?" I thought on March 8 it must not be here yet. I had a dinner party that night. Lots of touching, no social distancing. Some people from the small town I live in, some from NYC. Should have been more careful. But it's now 41 days later, and all the guests at the party are well. So I guess we dodged a bullet. On that day.#- Nowadays, when I go for a walk, or go to the market, I ask the same question and assume the answer is yes. The virus is here. #
- How do I keep it out of my lungs?#
- In server programming there's this idea of tainted text. If it came from outside the server, it could contain executable code. That's how hackers get into our systems, through tainted text. #
- Now I think about packages from Amazon the same way. I have a physical-world untaint function. I leave them alone for 24 hours. I've heard that the virus will die on cardboard in 24 hours. I assume whatever is inside the box is not dirty, but I think of it as tainted too. It came from outside. It's tainted. I wash my hands after handling it. Then at some point I shrug my shoulders and bless it as part of the house, and not tainted. It's how I maintain a level of sanity. #
- We wrote an excellent guide to being safe with macros in Frontier, many years ago. #
- I find a lot of parallels between programming and epidemiology. We've been dealing with similar concerns ever since our software started communicating over the open network. #