I remember complaining about only catching Monarchs. “Nothing interesting”, I’d say and was reprimanded by my father. He’d say, “in your lifetime, the Monarch will become extinct. Appreciate it while you can.” At six, I spent a lot of time thinking about what this meant and finally grasped the concept.

I carried this statement with me throughout my life. If I ever saw a Monarch, I’d tell anyone and everyone that it was going extinct. I’d get blank stares or asked “Why?” and I’d explain about pollution, not quite getting the story of milkweed straight. I later learned of the milkweed connection and how it is essential for the Monarch’s survival.

As the milkweed dies off, the Monarch is doomed. Recently it was added to the endangered species list.

Overall the migrating populations are less than half the size they need to be to avoid extinction.

https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/invertebrates/monarch_butterfly/

Save the Monarch Butterfly

Reading More
First thing is that I’ve been reading more. I usually find a book I really enjoy then set off to read everything they’ve written. This year, I found Barry Eisler and set off to read the 10 volume John Rain series as it takes place in large part in Tokyo. This is what pushed me over the one book per week mark. The other authors I’ve enjoyed are Gillian Flynn, Andy Weir, JK Rowling.

Impactful Books
I’ve read a few books that have profoundly changed me. Here they are:

1. The Premonition – Changed my life and I’ve joined the team at The Public Health Company. Coupled with The Fifth Risk, this book really hit hard and led me to believe something should and can be done about pandemic response and biosecurity.
2. On The Clock – An eye-opener on the dismal state of low-wage labor. I have much more respect for those putting in the hard labor and a disdain for the companies ruthlessly optimizing. I held one of the types of jobs written about so can see how thoroughly the industry has changed for the worse.
3. American Dirt – The sheer misery inflicted upon those looking for a better life of opportunity on the way to America.
4. The Grapes of Wrath – Another story about being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. Amazing this happened in the last century in American in the very region in which I live. I can’t drive through the I-5 agricultural corridor without thinking of the mad scramble to doom during the Dust Bowl years.

Reading to Connect
I’ve also started reading books to better connect with those around me. Some of those books are The Secret Garden, Nomadland, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and This is Going to Hurt.

As time goes on, I find myself using these sites less and less and when I do get there it’s more of a last resort. I’ve exhausted all my other options and I’m just fishing; prolly better off not thinking of the problem for a while.

So what is my first resort? GitHub. Or I’ll pull apart a library on my local machine and step through it. Ninety percent of the time, I’ll either find what I’m doing wrong or find what the code is doing wrong. In the latter case, I’ll head back to GitHub and see if there are any related outstanding issues. I sometimes will track down conversations on Gitter or Slack.

Using non-open source products kind of infuriates me when there are issues and all I have to rely on are the community and their last resort – support (or paid support). Support invariably leads to a) it’s on our roadmap or b) we’ll look into it and get back to you. Hardly satisfying.

I like to tinker and it’s not easy when the hood is welded shut.

It took about 15 minutes to find a place. It was up a flight of stairs into what looked like a studio apartment. We were the only ones there except the staff running the games. I sat at the only blackjack table and got a hundred in chips.

The shoe was tilted at an odd angle and you could actually see the space underneath. Playing in Vegas so many years, I was suspicious. My first hand I get an 11 and the dealer gets a six. What are the odds? Gotta double down. Dealer flips his card and has a five, hits and gets 21. My card was a 2. Down $50.

I’m totally getting scammed, but it’s so damn fascinating I can’t help myself. Another $25, another perfect hand. I don’t double down and the dealer gets kind of pissed. Same exact outcome, my 13 against the dealer’s 21.

I do it again, and again the same scene plays out. I get another hundred in chips. How the fuck is this guy doing this with my face almost inches from his hands. I have to know. I keep refusing the double down and this sets off some chain of events that leads me to getting escorted from the casino. I still have chips on the table. I start to say something and my friend tells me to let it go.

It’s good to have friends in Japan.

It was fascinating to see him at a movie theater. What the hell? Didn’t he have better things to be doing? Why was he with a group of people who were a full head shorter than him and why were his hands so damn big? What movie could he possibly be seeing? We had to know so we tailed the group.

We were stunned when he walked into the theater marked “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America – 8:30″. This legend of financial success was a fan of such low brow humor? I was spinning (also a little drunk) and pretty damn stoked as this was the same movie my group was there to see. And to top it off, we bought seats directly in front of him. We were going to hear the innermost secrets of motivation and success. I was going to regale my grandchildren with the wisdom of the .1% and live a life free of hardship.

The lights dimmed. His group fell silent. I couldn’t even catch one word from Tony; his voice being extremely distinctive, basically tattooed into my head by endless infomercials. He mumbled. I couldn’t make out what he was saying.. Damn.. He laughed.. and laughed some more. He was enjoying the movie while I was spying on someone literally taller than life. He ended up being just another person.. like most people are. I didn’t learn anything from this, but had a mediocre story to write on my blog on Christmas Eve during a pandemic.

I wish this had a more exciting ending.

$ git commit -m "Something terribly misguided" # (0: Your Accident)
$ git reset HEAD~                              # (1)
<< edit files as necessary >>                  # (2)
$ git add .                                    # (3)
$ git commit -c ORIG_HEAD                      # (4)

This is fine and all, but clobbers the original commit. Now I’m six commits in and realize I’m on the wrong branch for fuck’s sake. So thinking this through, I can create a branch based on my current HEAD, then reset the original branch. Something like this:

git branch feature/intial-commit
git checkout master
git reset --hard origin/master

I’ll continue to add idiocy here.

But I have found you can easily do port forwarding with socat. Find the port that minikube is running with docker ps -a:

ec33087e8aaf        gcr.io/k8s-minikube/kicbase:v0.0.11     "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   3 weeks ago         Up 2 hours          127.0.0.1:32795->22/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32794->2376/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32793->5000/tcp, 127.0.0.1:32792->8443/tcp   minikube

We see that 32793 is the exposed port for the registry (5000). Now run another container to accept connections on port 5000 and forward them to minikube port 32793:

docker run --rm -it -d --network=host alpine ash -c "apk add socat && socat TCP-LISTEN:5000,reuseaddr,fork TCP:$(minikube ip):32793"

Now you can push an image outside of minikube – docker push localhost:5000/test:1234 – then ssh to minikube (minikube ssh) and pull the same image – docker pull localhost:5000/test:1234

But why is the CDC counting viral and antibody tests together?

Just when I thought I’ve seen the worst, I always find more. Where is the bottom on this?

I’ve been saying for months that this thing is much more wide spread than people are realizing. So it was with great interest I followed the Stanford study on antibodies in the general population. Then I saw the Los Angeles County study that found the same thing.

The basic data:

• Santa Clara County: 2.5% to 4.2%
• LA County: 2.8% to 5.6%

People are saying it’s too early to interpret what these results mean and the data may not be accurate.

First, the same lab, Premier Biotech, conducted the serological tests. In the two control tests, there was a 100% success rate in identifying negative results with a lower success rate in identifying positive results. This means the county percentages are an underrepresentation.

Second, we don’t know if these antibodies mean a person is immune to a second infection. This is the question we need answered. This is going to tell us if a vaccine is even viable.

If we can’t achieve herd-immunity, we’re going to gain a fifth common human coronavirus. The virus should mutate to become less deadly over time, but how long will this take?