So I had an appointment for a PCR test at Hopkins yesterday through my oncologist, who I’d contacted as soon as I knew I had COVID. He basically told me they don’t consider me immunocompromised at this point even though my white blood cell count is still lousy, but got me an appointment for the PCR to check. For the first time since Sunday I left the cell room and went straight to the car, which the ladies had shoveled out, and drove myself to Columbia. I sat on line behind about eight other cars and waited until a nice lady in a spacesuit stuck a swab clear to the back of my skull and twirled it around for 10 seconds. Then I drove home and went right back up to my room. The results came back about four hours later: still positive.
I’ve been working hard on this presentation for work, and with that test it’s pretty much certain I’m not going to be going to DC to participate in the fun stuff (a live TED-style taping I helped organize) and possibly not the editing process either. We thought the issue might be that the PCR is super-sensitive and picked up the last 10% of the virus in my system, so I took an OTC test this evening and waited nervously for the results: still firmly negative. Not a hint of a line, not a blur, but a solid line. Fuck.
I’ve powered through about 500 broken links on the backend of the site here, and I see a couple of common issues so far:
- Major media outlets, as I mentioned earlier, have sucked at keeping their links current. Most of them do use some kind of redirect logic on the backend, but links to big outlets like CNN, and CBS have a 50/50 chance of resolving, and all the links I’ve found to the Baltimore Sun are completely broken.
- A quirk in how I originally built the site and how it’s structured now means that 1/4 of the internal images I uploaded and linked to (everything before about 2014 or so) are technically broken, although WordPress actually does a great job of redirecting to the right file. I’ve found a way to update these quickly, which is a blessing, because…
- …when I ported the site over from hand-coded pages, I missed a whole swath of links that pointed back into the site. These now need to be individually hunted down and updated. This will represent roughly 75% of the time I spend on this project.
- At some point something happened internally with the HTML parser that changed < and > with < and &rt; in random places, which are the character entity references for those characters. Because the < and > characters make up a huge chunk of HTML coding, this can be a gigantic problem: the HTML won’t parse and you (the reader) are looking at gobbledygook. I’m going through and trying to find the pages where this happens and fix it.
On the whole, this plugin is awesome, and it’s doing an excellent job of automating the process: it suggests a date-coded Wayback Archive link as close to the original post as it can find, which is pretty slick. 1600+ links to go…
Here’s my office setup for the past week: the dresser is now a stand-up desk, and I’m juggling cords and laptops as we do conference calls producing WRI’s yearly presentation. I just ran out for an official PCA test through Hopkins, and hopefully we’ll have results back within a day or so. If they’re negative, I might be sprung from the cell this weekend…?
I updated my Archives page last week to reflect the twenty+ years I’ve been writing here and got to thinking that a lot of the outgoing links from the first decade or so of this site are probably dead; most major media sites have been through two or three content management systems since 2001 and there are a bajillion smaller sites I found and linked to Back In The Day that have long since been snuffed out by time and commerce. I did some sleuthing and found a WordPress plugin that goes through each and every post to hunt down bad links, and provides a dashboard to view and edit them in a list. I installed it, ran it, and waited for a report: 2300+ broken links spread out over pages and images.
The tool is pretty nice; within the dashboard it allows me to edit the link and provides a handy suggestion in the form of an Internet Archive link to a cached version of the site—basically the closest we can get to the page I linked to at the time I linked to it. So I’m going through the painstaking process of manually updating each link as best I can, and when there is no better alternative, killing the link entirely. It looks like WordPress is hiccuping on something internally because a full third of the problems so far are images I’ve uploaded and linked to that it can’t find or doesn’t see—but which pop up when I load the pages. Could be the way earlier versions of WordPress created links are functional but enough to trip the breaker. Also, it looks like a lot of the early links made internally to other pages within this site aren’t formed correctly; they point to pages where WordPress points to a directory. So I have to go back through and manually fix all of those.
I’m currently crashing on a big work project, but in my downtime it’s easy to go through and clean up 20 links at a time. It’s nice to make incremental progress on something that soothes my OCD.
Jalopnik, a car blog from back in Ye Olden Days, is basically a dried up husk of what it used to be in its prime. But there are a few shining gems left if you know where to look: Last year David Tracy, who has been a correspondent there for years, went on a quixotic trip to revive a Jeep FC-170 in the Pacific Northwest, where it had been abandoned for decades. We’ve been waiting for the writeup ever since; he posted the whole story today. Seeing what he went through to get it running, and where he took it after that, is inspiring to say the very least. More of this, please.
I woke up on Friday with a sore throat and shrugged it off, thinking I’d spent the night snoring and had simply dried my sinuses out. It stuck around through the day—usually not a good sign—and on Saturday morning it was a bit worse. I began to get a bad feeling about it, and began thinking I should take the spare COVID test we had left from one of my trips over to see Brian. But all I had was the sore throat; I could taste and smell, I had no fever, or any other symptoms. Jen and I talked it over and we figured it was just allergies. I took allergy meds and made my way through the day as my nose started to run. On Sunday my my nose was constantly running, so I took some cold medicine and pulled the COVID test out of the box. Facing down a busy week of work and an on-site shoot next Tuesday, I wanted to be sure I was clear.
That second line on the bottom means oh shit. I immediately grabbed a couple of things and headed up to the spare bedroom to quarantine for the next eight days. My brother and sister-in-law dropped off spare OTC tests for Jen and Finn, and a pulse/ox meter to check my levels. Jen immediately began taking excellent care of me. It reminds me a little bit of the cancer days when I was knocked out by radiation and chemo, but at least then I wasn’t stuck talking to the girls through the door.
Finn went out and did battle with the snow, shoveling the front walk and the sidewalk all the way past the neighbors’ house. She’s going to be home for this week while we all quarantine, which also sucks. Jen set to work making food, and soon the lovely smell of chili wafted up through the floorboards into my room; when she brought a bowl up to me I gobbled the whole thing right up.
All things considered, I’m very lucky. Again, I have none of the other symptoms often mentioned. So far my oxygen levels haven’t been below 95% and I’ve only run a slight fever for a brief while. I’ve got my work laptop up here on the bed and I’ve been able to do everything remotely from my room. I’ve got Mom’s giant TV up on the dresser hooked up to a digital antenna, so I had reruns of Adam-12 on mute for part of the afternoon while I worked (broadcast TV is a fucking wasteland). I’m lucky to have gotten my booster when I did, and I’m super happy Jen got hers last week; the CDC just opened things up for 12-15 year olds so when we’re out of the clink we’ll get Finn her shot as well.
I didn’t expect to be one of the folks with COVID, but here we are. Once again, thank god for modern medicine.
In 2021, I did a lot of things I wasn’t planning on, but needed to get done, like rebuilding the front bearings, replacing the front brakes, installing a cool bumper and then adding fog lights. Okay, maybe the bumper and fog lights didn’t need to happen, but it sure looks better. Reviewing the T0-Do list from 2021, there are some big things I thought I might be able to accomplish and some that were blue-sky goals; there will be some things that carry over to next year. And I’ve got some new goals for 2022, in order of importance and realistic accomplishment:
- Replace the windshield. (2016) I pulled a good clear windshield from a Scout this summer, cleaned it up and made it ready to put in. I’ll need to order a new windshield gasket from Super Scouts, do some practice runs on the spare frames I’ve got, and then take a deep breath before I remove the old glass.
- Fix the goddamn wipers. (2019) I still don’t know what the deal is with the wipers or why the motor works but the switch doesn’t, but I’ve now got a third switch to swap in and see if I can get things to work behind the dashboard. If it’s not that, there has to be a melted wire somewhere that I’ll have to chase down in the rat’s nest back there.
- Fix the turn signal cam on the steering wheel. I’m 3/4 of the way into the teardown on my spare wheel, and it all seems to make sense so far. Sure would be nice to have functional cancelling turn signals.
- Rotate the tires. This is pretty self-explanatory, and should be easy once I get a decent floor jack. One thing I’d like to do while I have the tires off is measure the backspacing on the spare tire to see if it’s anywhere near the aftermarket wheels I’m running on the truck. This way I’ll know if I can use the spare on the front wheels without rubbing.
- Pull the spacer on the starter. I’ve come to find out the spacer in between my starter and the engine block is meant for automatic transmissions, so it needs to come out. I’m a pro at swapping starters at this point, so this should be a 30-minute fix, tops. Humorously, in going through my parts bins this week, I found a second spacer.
- Fix the battery tray. (2021) Super Scout Specialists has new trays in stock, and I’d like to get rid of the ghetto bungee cord I’ve been using for 11 years.
- Swap the gas tanks. I have the original steel tank Peer Pressure came with, and I’ve heard from several places that poly tanks will never seal at the sender properly. I’m inclined to believe this after eight years of suffering through gas fumes and leaks. The plan is to build a quick cradle/turntable out of wood, mount the tank on that, and dump some gravel inside. A half an hour of turning it like a cement mixer should remove any rust or scale inside, and then I can test it for leaks. When that’s done I’ll spray it with undercoating, test the sender, and put it in. I’m going to dig out the original evaporator linkage I stored away to aid in venting it properly. But the first thing I have to do is get the existing sender off the tank; it’s on there tight and not coming off.
- Get the spare engine on a proper engine stand. The problem isn’t the stand, but how I can lift the engine up onto it. My garage is in no shape to support a chain hoist or any kind of overhead block and tackle, so I’ll have to borrow an engine hoist from somewhere for a 15-minute operation.
- Buy a Scout Shed. My garage is pretty full, and I spend a lot of time reorganizing stuff just to move around in there. I’ve been considering a premade shed to store all of the parts I’ve got squirreled away, which would free up a lot of space in there. I’m earning some scratch on the side working on the schoolbus, and if I’m careful I could pay for this with a couple of weekends’ work.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Jen and I watched all six episodes of Hawkeye on New Year’s Eve and I enjoyed them immensely. It’s got a good mix of humor and drama and does a good job of showing how much wear and tear the non-super superheroes absorb when they’re saving the world. It’s a loose adaptation of the Matt Fraction comic run that I enjoyed; I liked how much they humanized the characters (Hawkeye wears a hearing aid due to all of the explosions and battles he’s been in the middle of) and enjoyed the cameos toward the end. We definitely need to watch Black Widow and catch up on things.
The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett was good too. It was basically just table-setting; I wasn’t expecting to be thrown into a wacky adventure out of the gate, so I don’t agree with the reviews I read that panned it. I’m looking forward to seeing where they take this.
We had some technological issues finding it, but we also watched the Return to Hogwarts special. (We have HBO through Hulu, and it was not available there, so I had to log in to Hulu on my laptop, run an HDMI cable from that to the TV, and mirror my screen because it blanked out when I tried to use AirPlay. Wasn’t that easy?)
The special was good; most of the good stuff has already been leaked to the press so there wasn’t anything new or interesting to hear about. It’s 2 hours long, and I’d say 1/3 of that was clips from the movies. But it was great to see the cast and hear them talk about their experiences and see how much they enjoy being around each other. It made me miss the movies all over again. Who’s up for another visit to the Wizarding World?
I’ve been considering a switch to my Instagram account to split out the Scout into its own account for a while now. Looking at the Top 9 results from this year, I think my mind is made up.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.