Let ‘er Rip!

Thanks in no part to Domicron Pairoftits we are now leading the way in new cases. And I know, the company line is now about how many are in hospital or ICU, but even the people getting sick and not going to hospital are still having a dire effect on the community. How many businesses have had to shutdown for a fortnight or so due to having no staff?

Either we start treating this like the common cold, an endemic – accept that everyone will get it and just go about our lives like normal, or we treat it like a pandemic and still have people isolating.

Fortnight endingAUSNSWVIC
Jan 8 2022559,058301,901143,518
Dec 25 202165,19439,00220,626
Dec 11 202120,6194,27616,071
Source: https://covidbaseau.com/cases/

That means that in the last fortnight we have had 65% of our total case count of 850,349 nationally.

Looking at those numbers, it would mean we have at least 1 million people in their own lockdowns; 559,058 due to being positive and at least that number again in close contacts. Thankfully the number of people in hospital is less than 3000 but of those in lockdown, only the positive people that don’t have sick leave or annual leave are entitled to the government support (which is taxable) of $750. The close contacts don’t get any support now unless they can’t work because they are caring for a positive case.

Positive Parties

I was just thinking to myself, now that I and one of my kids are confirmed positive and the other two are still awaiting results but couldn’t not have it, and since a few other friends also have it, does that mean we found all have a party?

I mean, you can’t get any more positive for corona right? As the cases rise we’ll soon teach a point where more people have it than don’t and at that point couldn’t we, as the majority, demand that our uninfected comrades stay home so that we can get on with our lives instead of hiding out in unairconditioned rooms suffering in silence.

I’m calling it now, it’ll be less than a month till there’s something in the news about the “outrageousness of some positive people having a party” some where.

Safer at School?

I don’t know why but both the Federal and the NSW Governments are adamant that children should be returning to school as soon as possible. Reading today I saw the following quote:

Ms Berejiklian said health advice continues to be that schools remain open, and parents, teachers and students can be confident that school is a safe place.

Education NSW website

What piques my curiosity is what are the schools doing in regards to hygiene and infectious disease control that can’t be done at other locations like cafes, pubs, and clubs?

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Folding@Home

As the SETI@home project has stopped handing out work units I was on the lookout for a new project to donate some spare compute cycles to and given the current state of affairs, the best option was the Folding@Home project which is researching protein folding of the corona virus.

And since you can setup teams for it, of course that is what I did.

Getting Started

head to https://foldingathome.org/ and hit the Start Folding Now button, download the app, get it running.

Joining the Lankyland team

Open up the Web Control interface once you have it installed, click Change Identity in the top left and add in these details.

  • Team number: 260468
  • Passcode: itscidersbirthday

Then sit back and smile a smug smile as your computer churns through data to help find a cure for the corona virus.

We all isolate or we don’t

I’ve been hearing on the news recently that people are disgusted that teens are still socialising and hanging out together and to be honest, it is not the teenagers fault.

Schools are still open, hundreds of children are still able to gather together in confined spaces. It’s no wonder that they are still getting together outside of school.

The mixed signals that the governments are sending are to blame. What’s the difference between going to school together and socialising outside of school together? They are all still together.

I know that data on transmission rates between children is sketchy at this stage but we have to ask ourselves, “Are our children furthering the spread of the virus from family to family?”

And even if they aren’t spreading it rapidly, shouldn’t our messaging be consistent? Either everyone is in isolation or no one is. I could stay home all day but if my kid is still going to school and playing with other kids whose parents aren’t isolating then I am still exposed even though I’ve not left my house in weeks.

Let’s get it together and keep our children apart.

NBN versus Corona

It is 2010 and then shadow communications minister Malcom Turnbull is talking about the growing NBN. It was 10 years ago and the internet wasn’t very fast, ADSL was the average, you’d get speeds anywhere from 1.5 Mbps to 15 Mbps if you were living right next to the DSLAM. Netflix was only just starting to migrate from DVDs to streaming media and Youtube was doing mostly 480p or “SD” video.

“For most, if not all applications, much lower speeds are perfectly [fine],” he said. “If you could deliver nationwide 12Mbps at relatively modest cost compared to the NBN, what is the additional utility/value of going from 12 [Mpbs] to 100 [Mbps].”
“People in the industry will tell you that they cannot get people to pay a significant premium for an increase in speed. That is partly because, that for a residential user, there isn’t much, if anything, you can do with 100 [Mbps] that you can’t do with 12 [Mbps].”

Malcolm Turnbull, 2010

Eventually he got his way and crippled the original NBN, changing it from a full fibre deployment to the horrible shambles it is now. “Mixed Technology Mode” – it was supposed to be cheaper and faster by incorporating existing infrastructure into the deployment, HFC and old copper. Turns out it took longer and cost more than the original fibre only plan.

And now in the midst of a major pandemic and with people all being told to stay and work at home we find ourselves with an unfinished NBN that struggles to reach speeds over 20 Mbps at most locations. The rare few like myself live in one of the early deployment areas and we have fibre to the premises but one suburb over there are people there that can’t get above 2 Mbps because they are on the fibre to the node setup. Turns out relying on 50 year old copper is a major flaw in the plan.

So as the government, both federal and state, all tell us to work from home, and as they bring in the telehealth services, we put additional strain on an already strained network. The backhaul links that should have been designed to handle multiple gigabit connections are only designed to handle throughput from old copper so congestion is getting worse. Netflix and Alphabet have started to alter the default bitrate levels on their streaming platforms to ease the load as more people are working from home and trying to entertain the children.

It is at times like these that we see that cutting corners on critical infrastructure just to save a couple of bucks is ALWAYS going to bite you in the ass.

Australia, our ass has been bitten hard.

The Good that can come out of Corona

It may seem hard to consider it now but having the world on lockdown will hopefully lead to a lot of good things happening.

The first thing is a complete change in how we work. With so many people being forced to work from home and doing it successfully, the old reasons that companies had against people working from home are being decimated. IT departments have had to scramble to scale up their VPN deployments and laptops are scarce, the NBN is taking quite a beating, but otherwise everything else seems to be going well.

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Unprecedented

adjective

  1. without previous instance; never before known or experienced; unexampled or unparalleled:an unprecedented event.

How many times have you heard the word “unprecedented” on the news recently? I am thinking of setting up a socially distant drinking game, everyone hangs out in their own lounge rooms, we have a video chat service, and then we fire up the news and do a shot every time someone says “unprecedented”.

I was just watching ABC News and in the last 15 minutes I would have sustained significant alcohol poisoning if I was playing.

Lankyland’s Response to Covid-19

There is no fucking response cause I refuse to spam all my friends and followers with details about how an abstract internet presence is combating something.

I have been getting non-stop emails from pretty much every place I have ever left my email address explaining how they are handling the Covid-19 crisis.

I DON’T FUCKING CARE

The upside is, I am getting to unsubscribe to a LOT of mailing lists that I never knew I was on.

But seriously, who the fuck cares about how various websites and online stores are responding to Covid-19? As long as I can email you and get a response I am not interested in your “community focused response” to a “critical health issue”. Just do your job and be happy that I am still a customer.