Coronavirus, Day 13 – Wild & Crazy Kids

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I think one of the biggest challenges that my house has faced through all of this has been not having good outlets to help us disperse the kids’ energy anymore.

A normal day would include plenty of time to run around with their friends at school followed by a good hour of playtime at the playground before coming home. Evenings are typically split between at least one kid working with an in-home therapist while the others do quiet work/play in between dinner and bedtime routines. Plus, swim class once a week is always a great way to wear them out!

And pretty much all of that is now out the window with schools closed and the playground closed and therapists either canceling or being quarantined!

I mean, it could be worse – I understand that, and I’m grateful that nobody’s actually sick – but it’s kind of chaos just the same!!!

It makes me really wish that we had a backyard the kids could run around on their own because our pool honestly takes up most of it and they definitely can’t play out there without adult supervision. Without even having theme parks or regular parks to slip away to on the weekend, everyone is very quickly developing their own flavors of cabin fever, which for the kids results in couch cushions thrown all over the room and toys even more thrown about than usual.

We’re hoping to establish some sort of routine as school kicks back up virtually next week, however there’s only so much that structure can do when all the kids really want to do is RUN! 😯

Coronavirus, Day 11 – Mild Inconvenience

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I had but a small taste of what it feels like to be cut off by hoarders today.

For the most part, we really haven’t struggled with groceries much since this thing started. Eggs always seem to be out, yet my wife found someone at work who has chickens and we were able to get a few that way that we honestly haven’t even used yet. Milk and bread looked tight, but before we’ve run out we seem to have been able to get some more.

Still haven’t managed to find toilet paper, and I think we’re down to maybe four rolls now, but I was able to pick up some extra baby wipes the other day so I’m not super concerned there.

Until today, what’s been the most challenging has surprisingly still been distilled water.

I need it for my CPAP machine. I honestly don’t usually even use the humidifier in it, but I started getting a sore throat from post-nasal drip right around when this all began and in that case the moisture is a lot better than forcing dry air down my throat for 7-8 hours every night!

So I don’t know if people bought it all out by mistake when they scooped up the drinking water or if people who specifically need it are hoarding it, but admittedly I felt kind of helpless watching my jug get closer and closer to empty while our shopping trips out kept coming up empty handed.

Between yesterday and today, it took me seven stores to end up finding some – Target, Walgreens, Winn-Dixie, CVS, Walgreens, Winn-Dixie, and then ironically that first Target again today suddenly had a couple dozen gallons on the shelf. Before that, I heard, “There wasn’t any on the truck we just got…” or “We only got 8 and they sold out immediately…”

One even told me when the next truck would come next Wednesday and suggested I wait in their parking lot like other customers have been doing!

And it was both frustrating and also humbling because sure, it was a giant pain in the ass and it felt a little dangerous to be running around everywhere while we’re supposed to be staying home, but also what if it was something like medication that I couldn’t find anywhere? Like that malaria drug that apparently is also used to treat lupus and has been flying off the shelves ever since Trump mentioned it in a briefing a few days ago?!

My result would be an extra sore throat, or worse side effects if I decided to just run regular water through my humidifier.

Someone else’s result for not getting their meds could be much worse!

I feel like that’s the big takeaway that I feel obligated to remind myself and other people about all of this is that if the worst I personally experience is some mild inconvenience, I’m getting off light as far as global pandemics are concerned.

Another 268 deaths here in the USA from this yesterday, and after playing with the numbers and reading some more articles about projections, I have a bad feeling that we’re nowhere near the worst of what this thing has to offer. I hope that everybody is wrong, but that’s not what we should be planning for…

Coronavirus, Day 9 – Looking at Problems Complexly

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Needless to say, these are not simple times in which we live…

The world is currently in chaos, and over the last 24 hours we’ve seen a lot of hesitation whereas up until now I’ve actually been kind of impressed how everyone had come to accept social distancing and remote work and even lockdowns as being what we had to do to help control the spread of this Coronavirus.

Just a quick glance at the data – showing that we added 11,000 new cases and are up to nearly 800 deaths – tells me that now might not be the best time for us, as a nation, to pivot.

And I get it. This is a complex problem and million of Americans are worried about an assortment of different things right now…

  • Some people are worried that they or their loved ones are going to get sick and die from COVID-19.
  • Some people are worried that they can’t pay their bills because they’re out of work.
  • Some people are frustrated because their kids are out of school and they’re not qualified to teach them.
  • Some people are worried that we’re doing permanent damage to the American economy.
  • And, let’s be honest – some people are just flat out bored.

All of these (except for that last one – grow up!) are valid concerns … to someone … and challenge lies in searching for solutions that do their best to appease as many of the people impacted as possible. We can’t crank the dial all the way in one direction because not only does it leave the other sides in the dark but that kind of jerkiness just isn’t good for the system as a whole.

I think part of the trouble with those in the camp of “We’ve sat around long enough – it’s time to get back to work…” is that they believe what they’re seeing right now is the worst it’s going to get.

They look at 19,000 people dead worldwide from COVID-19 and compare it to half a million flu deaths a year, and it seems like all of this is a lot of fuss for nothing.

In fact, one of the quotes that I liked when we first started talking about closing down schools and businesses was something like, “If this works like we want it to, it’s going to look like nothing happened at all. And we’re going to have to be ok with that.”

The thing is, we only have other countries to compare our progress to right now – which admittedly are confusing…

  • China has 1.3B people, 81,000 cases, and 3,281 deaths – that’s a 4% death rate for the Chinese.
    • Their trajectory spanned the end of January through February.
  • Italy has 60M people, 69,000 cases, and 6,820 deaths – that’s a 10% death rate for Italy.
    • Their trajectory started at the end of February and it looks like they might be hitting their halfway point.
  • The USA has 327M people, 55,000 cases, and 782 deaths – that’s a 1% death rate for us.
    • Our trajectory started at the beginning of March and we’re still on our way up.

I can see how that’s daunting for people who are either A) watching their bills pile up, B) watching their retirement accounts fizzle, or C) just pulling their hair out having the kids home all day.

I think the tricky thing here is that we need to evolve our response to Corona without just doing a 180 by saying, “Let’s have all the pews full in two weeks for Easter!”

I don’t think that’s very reasonable, and if we do as a nation decide to just slam on the brakes and try to go back to normal, I sincerely believe that it isn’t going to be the normal we remember for very long…

But there are things that we can do!

  • Congress needs to get their act together and work out a stimulus bill that helps businesses and individuals in need without just recklessly doling out cash to people and businesses that don’t really need it.
  • Schools can take more steps with virtual learning, which I know that they’re still trying to figure out, and that has to be ok, too. I know a lot of businesses that don’t get remote work, so we can’t expect an apples to apples result when asking kids and their over-worked parents to try and do the work of their teachers.
  • And as for the economy, I think this is where we need to separate the wants from the likes because it’s probably not going to return to the bull market of perpetually rising returns for a while. We need to somehow look at the difference between short and long term investments here because long term (e.g. my retirement, which is 20+ years off) has plenty of time to recover; short term is hopefully more isolated to folks on Wall Street who can afford to lose the money, although I’d wager there are probably also some boomers nearing retirement who have far more aggressive retirement funds than they should for their age … and they’re probably freaking out right about now.

And of course, we need to take into account what’s best to slow the spread of the virus – which medical professionals still maintain is social distancing.

Can we afford for businesses to be shut down for another month or two when people are feeling burnt out after barely 10 days of this???

Can we afford to see cases skyrocket if we just, as I saw one comment on Facebook put it, “Pretend this never happened…” and  it turns out that whatever social distancing we were doing was dramatically keeping the virus in check???

Or can we take a step back, and agree to not make any rash decisions, and do whatever we can to keep this thing at bay while businesses try to innovate by offering food delivery services and embracing their employees working from home and trying to find jobs for other displaced workers while shoring up unemployment and our other social safety nets to catch the rest?

Like I said, it’s a complex problem and there is no one solution that will magically make everything better.

So we need to be thoughtful. And graceful. And extra kind in everything that we do because the reality is that people are dying from this thing and that needs to remain in the forefront of everybody’s minds for whatever our next steps might be.

Coronavirus, Day 8 – Deciphering Data

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I know that a lot of people are really frustrated with the statistics that we’ve seen coming out of the COVID-19 crisis. Some people flat out think they’re bullshit and feel that they’re too flawed to be worth paying any attention to.

Being a guy whose career involves understanding data … I don’t agree.

I wish the data was better, but at least it’s something and when we’re trying to measure the impact of a worldwide phenomenon, something is better than nothing.

Sure, in a perfect world, testing would be readily available to anyone who showed the slightest symptoms, and hospitals would all follow the exact same procedures for dealing with the virus, and people would go to the doctor when they’re supposed to, and health departments wouldn’t sometimes fudge their numbers, and so on and so forth!

Of course, in a perfect world one might argue that we wouldn’t be dealing with a global pandemic in the first place, so there’s that…

So the data is what it is – we just have to quantify it and keep those exceptions in mind, which I get can be frustrating when we’re being told not to leave the house and we feel like we’re making all of these sacrifices by maintaining our distance and the total # of deaths seem small compared to things like the flu and other common causes.

Regardless, what I’ve found is most insightful for me over the last week is to really only focus on a couple of metrics:

  • Daily New Cases, specifically in the United States <— this is my main focus
  • Total # of Deaths, both in the US and here in Florida <— this is my reminder that we’re talking about human lives at stake

The data I look at each day is found here – https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

In particular, I look at this chart to see how the rate of the spread is growing here in our country…

Now for clarity, yes – the numbers are growing because we’re testing more people than we were two weeks ago. That’s ok! What we’re really looking for is merely the curve to help judge when the spread has reached its maximum growth rate to ultimately help indicate when things might start getting back to normal.

Compare our graph above to China’s latest…

That’s what we’re waiting for ours to look like – the same gradual growth that we’re seeing now as the Chinese came to terms with the virus, a few anomalies along the way, followed by a gradual decrease to where they’re seeing a fraction of the new cases each day and it’s safe to assume that they’re volumes that their healthcare system can once again support.

I mean, I guess there are some people who are just never going to trust the data no matter what it says, and there’s so much commentary and anecdotal evidence and sheer panic going around that maybe it’s easy for some to cast doubt in what they’re seeing on the page.

I personally think it’s safe to look at these numbers as a barometer – we’re not solely relying on them to make major, guiding decisions in our lives during this crisis. They’re simply a guide to help us understand how things are going and if the shore is in sight on the other side of this thing yet.

Unfortunately, I think we’ve still got a ways to go, which is a whole nother ball of problems in the chaos that it creates as we push through this. I know that we’ll get there eventually, but there will definitely be casualties along the way – literally, economically, you name it.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to carry a light as we make our way through this.

That’s all the data serves as – no more, no less.

Coronavirus, Day 4 – Investing During Disaster

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

This seems like kind of a weird post to write as we see more and more people getting laid off or struggling for work as the virus spreads, so just bear with me…

I found myself buying some stock yesterday.

Not a lot, really. I think I spent about $150 between two different companies, and the only reason I did is because quite frankly, it was really, really cheap.

That’s kind of the unique perk of the markets tanking like they have over the last couple of weeks – while it’s painful to watch our retirement accounts fall something like 25%, it also presents the opportunity to buy at a discount for however long this market takes to recover.

This is intriguing to me because I don’t like to admit it, but I stopped contributing to my 401k a little over a year ago when our finances weren’t doing so hot. In fact, I doubled down by taking out a 401k loan and then stopping my regular contributions, too, which I’d been otherwise making religiously for a long time, so I’ve been disappointed in my retirement savings whereas it used to be something I felt pretty good about.

I’ve had the conversation with people a few different times now that despite uncertainty in the markets, now isn’t the time to pull your retirement funds. If anything, as long as you’re nowhere near ready for retirement, low points like this are when it’s smart to buy more! So far this year I’ve slowly started limping my 401k contributions back up from 0%, and though they’re nowhere near what I’d like them to be … it’s something.

Anyways, the other day at random I started thinking about some of the businesses currently on hold – namely theme parks and cruise ships – and it wasn’t much of a surprise to see that they’ve really gone south!

As of when I’m writing this (3/19, after market close), here’s what they looked like (compared to one month prior)…

  • Walt Disney Company (DIS) – $94.93, down 34% from $144.63
  • Universal Corporation (UVV) – $44.13, down 12% from $50
  • SeaWorld (SEAS) – $8.54, down 76% from $35.25
  • Six Flags (SIX) – $11.39, down 75% from $45.11
  • Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL) – $22.41, down 83% from $133.51
  • Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) – $10, down 80% from $50.83

Now I honestly don’t think much about individual companies for investments anymore – what little stock I did own, I sold off and traded for an S&P 500-based index fund instead. And of course, all of our retirement savings are in similar mutual funds.

Still, it’s kind of fun to own a small piece of a company – something I used to boast about Disney before I sold my shares because kids are even more expensive than their park tickets!

It’s also worth noting that A) I like all of these companies, and B) I don’t really have any doubts that they’re going to recover from all of this … eventually. It might take a while, namely because lord only knows how long these closures will need to drag on, but they’re all popular entertainment businesses with large assets, be it cruise ships or castles or even whales and dolphins… 😉

So for starters, I bought a handful of shares of both SeaWorld and Royal Caribbean. I’ll probably buy a few more tomorrow once we get paid, too, depending on how all of the dollars and cents wash out.

I’m not looking to get rich off of these investments, however I do believe in each of their brands and what they do, and 80% off seems like a pretty good deal when you’re buying companies that you enjoy and admire!

If they can help to bridge that gap left behind by not contributing to my retirement over the last couple of years, that would be nice because honestly it’s probably one of the few “risky investments” that I’d ever feel comfortable gambling my money on.

Do with these thoughts what you will, as I’m certainly not a financial professional. I’m just a guy who likes Florida’s tourism industry, and saw a fun opportunity to own a piece of some fun companies that my family enjoys. 😉

Coronavirus, Day 3 – Shopping Frenzy

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Yesterday was the first day I went to the grocery store since all of this started and it was like Target was liquidating their entire grocery section.

I kind of figured that water and toilet paper would be out, but this was entire aisles just empty.

At one point I watched a couple staring at one of the cooler cases that sit in the middle of the main aisles and I couldn’t help but imagine their dialogue, “Well, I guess we can eat these pre-made mashed potatoes for the next two weeks…”

My biggest concern at the moment is finding distilled water for my CPAP machine. I don’t have to have it, but I’ve had a sore throat and it helps at night. I was able to add a case of it for backup to our bottled water delivery, but that’s a few weeks away.

It’s all definitely surreal because I’ve never seen hurricane reactions this bad. And yet I get it – people are scared, and so they do whatever they think they can do to look out for their families.

I think it scares me more to read that gun sales are apparently through the roof, too. It makes me wonder if we’re going to fall to a place of robberies and looting if supplies aren’t readily available.

Yesterday I found a huge smear of dog shit on the back of my car parked in our driveway. No idea if it was just kids screwing around or if somebody has a beef with us.

The only one I would guess would be the HOA and I’m pretty sure they’re still just sending nasty letters!

The Coronavirus

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

We’re kind of living in a weird time, aren’t we?

Almost any place of gathering – schools, sporting events, even Disney World and other theme parks – are all closed.

Pretty much any office job is recommending their employees work from home.

And for some reason, there’s a major shortage on toilet paper … which ironically enough, I only learned about 30 minutes ago that we’re actually running low on at my house! 😯

I’m really trying to adopt the philosophy of focusing on the silver lining of this whole situation – that being a change of pace, albeit forced, from the daily life that is normal for me right now. Instead of a day filled with rushing to work only to leave to pick up kids a few hours later, then trying to juggle more work and supporting my family until bedtime, and then trying to support my writing business with whatever’s left, I’m challenging myself to take a different approach…

In being home all day, I want to truly take advantage of being home by spending lots of time with my family, breaks to help them with crafts and academics, meals together, etc…

I also want to try and get a tackle on organizing our house, as for the next several weeks apparently it’s going to become our lifeboat!

I want to reinforce my support for remote work by showing how physical location has no impact on the quality of my work. In fact, I expect it to improve as I won’t have to don headphones like whenever conversation surrounds me at the office!

I want to do what I can to help support small and local businesses because I know that some of them are going to take a real beating from this thing. Actually, just this morning I supported a local business by paying a guy to come fix my sprinkler system, so we’re off to the races already! 😀

If I can find the time, I’d love to squeeze in a little exercise … we’ll see…

And ultimately I just want to help improve myself by taking this bizarre opportunity to slow down and focus on the things that are really important for a change.

The whole legitimate excuse for avoiding people I guess is simply a bonus! 😉

FINALLY! An Actual Use for QR Codes!!!

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

There’s no sense in holding back now – I’ve honestly always thought that QR codes were kind of dumb.

BUT…

I just stumbled across a pretty cool idea for them at home that I wanted to share!

You see, I just bought a new wifi access point, so I’m doing some spring cleaning on my home network and I ended up renaming the SSID that my guest network uses.

This is notable because I’m one of those weird people who believes in long, simple passwords instead of complicated strings that are hard to remember and thus I’ve grown accustomed to many an eye-roll when people ask what my wifi password is at home … often times resulting in guests just handing over their devices and asking me to type it in for them…

But no more!

So I found this blog post talking about an office posting a QR code that visitors could use to easily login to their guest wifi and I figured, why not try that at my house, too?!

I took it a step further by using this free website that let’s you generate your own QR code in about 30 seconds…

And the end result, after a couple of quick tests to watch the magic work, was this simple Word doc that I could print out and stick to the fridge for easy access anytime someone visits:

For the most part, I still think that these things are dumb – maybe because they just never got the penetration here in the States to justify companies pasting them all over everything instead of using their URLs – but if it saves me from being tasked with typing my 46-character wifi password into the phones of every friend and family member who comes to my house, then I will take one for the team and admit … this particular use case is kind of neat. 😉

Dream Journal : Sky High Living

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

It’s not uncommon for me to have dreams where I’m suddenly back living in my hometown and I have to essentially figure out how to move out all over again. Sometimes my job has also vanished, however this time I was still working remotely for my current employer, so money apparently wasn’t a concern.

After cycling through the usual options – find an apartment of my own in my hometown, move downstate in Michigan, or again move to Florida – I found myself also branching out in a new direction by deciding that I’d always wanted to live in a high rise, so now was the time to do it…

It started with exploring a skyscraper in downtown Tampa that was surprisingly similar to the one that I worked in (Tampa City Center) when I actually moved to Florida. The “apartment” that I looked at was pretty ridiculous, spanning two floors with massive, floor-to-ceiling windows looking out across the rest of downtown. It even had a fireman’s pole to slide down from the loft to the main level!

Once we had gawked at the incredible views that said ridiculous apartment somehow afforded on a meager software engineer’s salary, we went to explore the rest of the building of which quite a bit was actually accessible as we were able to ride up and down in elevators and take staircases and sometimes even climbing ropes between the various floors.

It was when we came to a rather large and ornate ballroom, we found an artist painting a beautiful mosaic on the floor. I asked her if she was creating something new, to which the woman explained that she was merely doing touch-ups because the building had recently been sold.

I can’t remember if it was being sold by or being sold to, but I recall that one of the parties involved was none other than Donald Trump.

…and needless to say, it made me very mad!

After brooding for a while and hoping Trump was losing money on the deal, me and my friend found ourselves being chased by a group of security guards … presumably for wandering around in places where we weren’t exactly supposed to be. Luckily we managed to put more and more distance between us as we ducked in and out of secret passages and even more strange mechanisms to move us from one floor to another – the latest being a sort of platform on a track that winded between floors and around a bar that overlooked a restaurant on the floor below.

It was never clear whether I ended up renting that incredible apartment high in the sky, or if I ran into Mr. Impeachment himself. I still think it would be neat to live in a skyscraper, though family life … and the salary that it entails … makes that lifestyle pretty impractical anyways… 😉

Evolution of a Media Collection

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I wish I had kept better records of this over time – I’m basically just going by when I added new drives, but it’s still crazy to see how this collection has grown over only five years time…

Consider this – when I first got interested in collecting media back in my early twenties, I started with three 80 GB hard drives … one was fully dedicated to music, another animated TV (mostly The Simpsons, Futurama, and Duckman), and the third was live TV. These disks were filled first with a 56k modem that incessantly redialed all night long, and then later by a 1 Mbps cable modem.

Now here in 2019, I just finished building out a 106 TB NAS, with a 500 Mbps fiber line to fill it.

It kind of makes me wonder just how long the remaining 35 TB left on my new NAS are going to last me, especially when the data somewhat shows how I tend to go through a bit of a spike in downloads whenever I have new disk space available to me. 😉