busybee fluffy rambles

My shortness of breath has gotten somewhat worse, and my peak flow is around 400 L/min, which is somewhat lower than my average healthy level.

I had a video visit with one of the nurse practitioners at One Medical and while my symptoms aren’t severe enough yet that they think I need urgent attention, they do want me to come in this afternoon for a secondary screening so they can check out my lungs and see what’s going on with my asthma, at least.

Despite the current administration’s advertisements, there’s still no test kits available, and they’re not expected to be for a couple weeks. This h*cking country, am I right? And the CDC still only care about suspected direct exposure or people who have themselves traveled internationally, despite the growing epidemic and the fact that almost none of the confirmed cases (including deaths) fell into those categories.

If this were just an asthma flare due to a cold they’d be putting me on prednisone (which is a standard course of treatment which works well for me), but they’re concerned about the immunosuppressant effect if I do have COVID-19.

Let’s say you’re stuck working from home due to an ongoing apocalypse. Let’s say that you use separate GitHub accounts for personal projects vs. work (for one of any number of reasons), and that when you’re working from home you’re using a personal computer. Let’s say that for Reasons it’s not feasible for you to juggle multiple user accounts on said computer, and you need to be able to access both of your GitHub accounts without a lot of hassle.

The main problem is that GitHub ties your ssh key to your account (out of necessity), but all connections to GitHub are via the master git@github.com account, so there’s no easy way to differentiate which key to use at runtime.

So, here’s how I managed to set things up so that I could select a GitHub account on a per-shell basis.

Pretty much all of the tech companies (mine included) have moved to a “work from home unless absolutely necessary” policy. We’re all suddenly getting into a remote-worker mindset — which I think is a long-term good thing, but it’s jarring. Looking out my dining room window I still see a typical amount of foot and car traffic for this time of day, but there’s an air of desperation and paranoia. Maybe I’m just projecting though.

My own symptoms have all but cleared up. I do have a persistent ache in my back and shoulders, which I’m not sure if it’s attributable to this mystery illness or is simply my fibromyalgia flaring up as always. My temperature is back to normal. I’m still coughing on occasion but it’s infrequent, and it’s gone from dry to productive. My shortness of breath is… well, still lurking, but doesn’t feel like an impairment at the moment. I’m still glad that I have a pretty strong reserve of albuterol, all the same.

I took a sick day today, because I was feeling very much under the weather, and had a mild fever and a bit of a cough. I rested up a bunch and I’m feeling a lot better now. Still slightly short of breath. So I’m probably going to continue to work from home for the next few days at least (a shame, I really want to try out my new chair which finally arrived today!) and if I hear that COVID-19 test kits are both reliable and available I’ll probably see about getting tested, even if it doesn’t progress any further than this. I’m also going to skip my drawing group this week.

So, COVID-19 has made it to Seattle, and there’s been enough localized outbreaks that people are absolutely flipping out because of it. Store shelves have been cleared of nonperishables, paper products (especially toilet paper!), hand sanitizer, face masks, and bottled water (even though there’s been absolutely no concerns about our water infrastructure whatsoever and this is only causing problems for people who need to, like, fill their CPAPs and humidifiers and whatever).

Hospitals are completely overwhelmed and unprepared, and there’s no test kits to go around. I have people shouting in one ear about how terrible everything is and how we’re all going to die, and people in the other ear saying how everyone who’s overreacting is being silly and there’s no reason for anyone to do anything differently.

Somewhere in the middle, I am concerned about the pandemic, but also about what this will do to this city while everyone’s in a panic.

And meanwhile, I’m coming down with something. I don’t know if it’s my usual winter cold, or something worse; I don’t think I’ve been in a situation where I’d have been exposed to COVID-19 in particular, but for the past few days I’ve had persistent shortness of breath, and today I started feeling nauseous and came close to vomiting; not a typical COVID-19 symptom but not without precedent either.

I contacted my new doctor about it and they gave me the usual CDC guidance and that if I’m feeling ill and haven’t been directly exposed to coronavirus I should come in for an exam, and if I have possibly been exposed they can do a video visit to get a better idea of what’s going on. Meanwhile I had a hot shower and some toast and fried eggs for dinner and I’m feeling somewhat better. Not great, but better.

So, I’ve had a Makerbot Replicator Duo since late 2012; I bought it used at a significant discount (“only” $1200!) and it’s served me pretty okay. But over time, better, cheaper printers have come along, and my Replicator has gotten pretty unreliable. Actually it’s been pretty much hobbling along for the last several years:

• The heated print bed stopped heating, due to it shorting out due to a well-known design flaw in the print bed connector¹
• One of the last firmware updates made it only compatible with Makerbot’s own proprietary software, which was very soon discontinued to upsell newer Makerbot versions
• The left extruder stopped working at some point; the right extruder barely works
• The hot end really needs new nozzles but the design is such that replacing the nozzle is very easy to crossthread/ruin the hot end²
• And really it’s never been all that great, it was just pretty much the only game in town when I bought it

So anyway, yeah, this upgrade is long-overdue.