I recently found out there was a season 3 of Narcos. Wow. That goes on my list. Also, I thought this season was the last for Better Call Saul. Imagine my surprise when I got to the end, and nothing was resolved. Okay, I'd better survive this virus thing so I can find out what happens to Lalo and Kim. #
On April 14, a single bottle of hand sanitizer arrived via USPS at my local post office. Ordered via Amazon on March 14. $11.99. Shipped via China Post, China's equivalent of the USPS. It arrived in Hawthorne, CA on March 24 on its way to my kitchen in upstate NY. #
- I had a pretty terrible Dropbox outage here since Friday, but with help from Daniel Bradley, I was able to get most of my servers connected to Dropbox again. #
- I just noticed that the server for LO2 got completely trashed in the process. I have no idea how, but I had a backup from yesterday, which I am now restoring. It may take about an hour or so. Any work done between the outage and the restoration will be lost. Sorry. #
- I'm going to have to stop depending on Dropbox. Obviously the Linux version is not a priority for them, it's breaking a lot these days. I've been a Dropbox user since the beginning. But it's been obvious for a few years that this is no longer a good match. #
- Update: Well that was pretty good outage-wise. Less than 15 minutes. But data was lost. It seems fortunate this happened after I added the backup command. No excuse for not having copies of your files. #
- Sometimes I write posts to solicit info from my brain trust, the people who read my blog. Yesterday I wrote about the non-inevitablity of a Covid-19 vaccine, and got two interesting responses. #
- From correspondent #1.#
- HIV has a very high mutation rate, it's a constantly changing target, very hard to vaccinate. Fortunately this corona virus is highly conserved (stable), there are many stable proteins you can target. We don't see a reason why that stability would change as it's already spread around the world. #
- From correspondent #2.#
- I wanted to offer a few reasons for limited, cautious optimism, and one reason for a little bit of pessimism.#
- Nobody ever "gets better" from HIV on their own. Our immune systems can't beat it. So it's hard to make a vaccine that teaches our immune systems how to beat it.#
- We do get better from the flu on our own. But the problem is that the flu is a "modular" virus that can be recombined, so there's always a new version. So flu vaccines work, but there's a new vaccine every year.#
- Our bodies can beat the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19. People usually get better in a few weeks, if they don't die.#
- Many people who caught the original SARS-CoV virus in 2003 still had antibodies ~10 years later.#
- The SARS viruses are unusually complex, and in order to replicate correctly, they have pretty good proofreading. So they mutate much more slowly than HIV or the flu.#
- But there's also one reason to worry:#
- There are four other coronaviruses that cause about 15% of cases of the common cold. We build immunity to these viruses but it usually doesn't last forever.#
- So as I understand it, the biggest question with SARS-CoV-2 isn't whether we can teach our bodies to beat it. It's how long our immune system will remember. And whether we can find a low-risk vaccine that doesn't cause other problems.#
- As always, Scripting News readers are the smartest and best. 🚀#
From left to right, my uncle, Ken Kiesler, his friend Sparky, my grandfather Rudy Kiesler, and me. I'm guessing this is 1989 or 1990.#