I admit I made a mistake yesterday. The other day I found out that the wholesale restaurant supply chain Restaurant Depot has opened to the public for purchasing items during the pandemic. So my wife and I headed out there to pick up supplies. We found toilet paper (the giant industrial rolls you get in public bathrooms) along with all kinds of snacks and basics (like canned coffee), and we even batted around buying an industrial toaster. But I failed to pick up one thing while we were there, and I am starting to think I may regret it. I didn't buy any meat.
Yes, I am not a vegetarian and my waistline attests to this. We are one of those families where dinner is not served unless it has some sort of small meat portion. Well, it looks as if we are headed to a meat shortage with the closure of several packing plants, but now a major Smithfield plant in South Dakota closes indefinitely because of a major Coronavirus outbreak. As usual, the "I have beagles but no cream-cheese" situation appears in my life. Now that I have toilet paper...
This looks like it will just keep going on and on. Experts warn that this social distancing thing may go on into 2022, New York has ordered that face-masks are now mandatory, and the Japanese government is warning that as many as 400,000 may die from the outbreak. Issues with unemployment systems nation wide continue but if you are up for some tech challenges IBM is offering free COBOL training. And according to one economist, all this trouble will end up saving the economy $5 trillion. Who knows if this is correct, but even a stopped clock is correct twice a day.
Of more than passing interest, Reason Magazine (those most reasonable of reasoning reasoners) have a video covering the "hack a ventilator" issue I mentioned a couple days ago. There's a lot of good background info in the video...
In other tech news
• We got a big patch day this past Tuesday, with fixes for security flaws in fonts (??!!) and a host of other things from Microsoft. There are also patches available from both Intel and Adobe as well. Time to reboot.
• Creator of the Game of Life, John Conway, has his final turn and loses to COVID-19.
• That coronavirus post from your crazy uncle on facebook might not be all that truthful. Social Media corespondent Captain Obvious is suffering from argyria and cannot be reached for comment.
• Your Zoom account's credentials are probability for sale on the dark web for less than a penny in bulk, which is about what they paid for their security.
• French study concludes that hydroxychloroquine treatment for COVID-19 is useless. They're not the only ones. Medical corespondent Captain Obvious is still in the hospital and is unavailable for comment.
• Frontier Communications is now exploring their final frontier.
• Top selling items during the stay-at-home: disposable gloves, cough medicine, soup, bread machines, rice... bread machines?
• Researchers as Georgia State University are reporting that the rheumatoid arthritis drug Auranofin is effective in the treatment of COVID-19. Wait, I only though we were doing bad news on this post...
Cool things from round da web
• Another 3-D printed Iron Man armor, now with more girl.
• Coronavirus not giving you enough nightmare fuel? Try giving a homeless tarantula a home.
• Isolation hasn't driven you mad just yet? Build you own Nintendo Switch from scratch. Dozens of tiny screws to lose under your chair included.
• 7-Up Ford Mustang. That is all.
• And the coolest thing so far... an abandoned computer store that has been left untouched since the early 2000s.
I remember CD-ROMs. And polar bears. Remember polar bears?