Notices by Jonathan Kamens (jik@federate.social), page 4

There's an old Jewish joke… Two yentes are eating dinner at a Borscht Belt hotel. One says, "The food here is terrible!" The second responds, "Yes, and the portions are so small!"
Although the portion sizes here are indeed small (I was warned about this by the nurse), I can apparently order essentially whatever I want to make up for it.
Food is ordered over the phone; ordering digitally on-screen in the room is not an option here like it is at some other hospitals.
#PanCholLiveToot

I don't want to be too overly dramatic about this, but if you open a new box of tissues, like, for example, the ones they give to patients in the hospital, and it's impossible to pull the first tissue out of the box without a big wad of tissues coming out with it, that's not an accident and it's not poor design, it's theft. The manufacturer has designed their packaging to encourage this wastage so they can sell more tissues.
Not speaking theoretically. Looking at you, #Medline.
#PanCholLiveToot

Good morning, and welcome to day 2 of #PanCholLiveToot! I slept ok, despite the hospital bed, thanks mostly to the personal pillow I had the foresight to bring with me. Also, the temperature in the room is lovely.
Breakfast this morning was the same level of mediocre as dinner last night; enough said.
Apparently hospitals are just as bad at shower design as hotels. The hottest shower available in my room is obtained by turning the handle all the way around and pointing it at "C". *sigh*

It's the start of day 3 of #PanCholLiveToot! So far no reaction to the experimental vaccine (or placebo!).
#today I want to talk about why it's so important for people to volunteer to participate in clinical trials.
Simply put, medical advances save lives, and advances are often impossible without human trials.
Trials are designed to be extremely safe.
They usually even pay a bit of money (more on that later).
Please consider volunteering! See my blog for more info: https://blog.kamens.us/2023/03/27/the-easiest-way-in-the-world-to-save-lives-has-been-inside-you-all-along/

#Today is day 4 of my week in isolation while participating in a clinical trial for a new cholera vaccine.
I've complained in this thread about the hospital food, so I want to acknowledge that today's vegetarian smoky bean chili was excellent. Out of the 9 meals I've had here so far, this is the first I would say that about!
#PanCholLivetoot

If you haven't participated in a clinical trial before, you may not realize that participants are paid, and expenses are reimbursed.
For example, for this clinical trial, I will be paid $50 for each of my trips to the hospital preparing for the inpatient stay, and $200 for each day in the hospital during the isolation period. I'll also be reimbursed for my travel expenses.
I don't do it in the money, but the money makes it a bit more palatable.
#PanCholLiveToot

I don't actually have any reimbursable travel expenses for the three appointments before the isolation period, because I rode my motorcycle to/from those appointments and parked it at a bike rack so there were no parking fees. If I had driven they would have paid for my parking.
However, I didn't want to leave my motorcycle parked on the street for a week, so this week I took the bus to the hospital and will take the bus home at the end. Those bus fares will be reimbursed.
#PanCholLivetoot

The phone in my room, which I am supposed to use to order my meals from food service, randomly stopped working today some time between when I ordered breakfast and when I tried to order lunch. The nursing staff was not able to figure out what's wrong, so perhaps they've put in a ticket with IT. In the meantime I am going to have to give my food orders to the nurse for them to call in for me. D'oh!
#PanCholLivetoot

Friday evening I'll start antibiotics to purge the trial vaccine. I've already begun stockpiling extra snacks from food service to take with the antibiotics to avoid stomach upset.
Saturday they'll test to see if the vaccine has cleared my system. The test takes about a day. If it comes back ok, I'll go home Sunday. Otherwise, I'll go home Monday.
I'm hoping the side-effects from the antibiotics aren't too severe, because I need to work the polls for 15 hours Tuesday!
#PanCholLiveToot

Good morning! It's day 5 in the hospital as a guinea pig for a cholera vaccine. I'm feeling good. How are you?
My hospital phone is broken again, so again my nurse had to order my breakfast. I hope it's fixed in time for me to order lunch!
The entire time I've been here, I've had trouble reaching only one site on the guest wifi… https://xkcd.com. Did an xkcd strip piss off an administrator so he ordered IT to block the site hospital-wide? lol!
#PanCholLiveToot #xkcd #today

#JesseWaters said if his wife voted for #KamalaHarris, it would "violate the sanctity of our marriage."
Here's the thing…
If you're married to a woman and you're voting for #DonaldTrump,
…and you think you have the right to tell your wife how to vote,
…and your wife thinks she needs to lie to you about whom she's voting for,
then you've already violated the sanctity of your marriage.
#politics #USPol

It will never stop being funny to me when an #infosec company or org can't handle the basic task of putting the correct email addresses in their #DMARC record. This is well into "You have one job…" territory.
(#ISSA is the Information Systems Security Association, which IMO has always been kind of a joke whose only real purpose is as a self-perpetuating mutual-admiration society.)
It's worth mentioning that the ISSA web site is also down right now; probably unrelated incompetence.

P.S. This morning's batch of DMARC aggregate reports sent by my server also generated a bounce from johnhancock.com. I am certainly reassured about the information security of major financial institutions when they also cannot handle the simple task of accepting DMARC aggregate reports at the email address they advertise for that purpose!
#infosec #JohnHancock

One interesting thing about working for the executive branch is that, thanks to the Hatch Act, I'm not allowed to donate to political campaigns or post things encouraging other people to donate to political campaigns.
So this post is definitely not me encouraging people to donate to any political campaign ten days before the most consequential federal election of our lifetimes.
#politics #USPol

Posting this tonight for no particular reason:

"Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed.

That word is 'Nazi.' Nobody cares about their motives anymore."
- @JuliusGoat

I *love* (narrator: he absolutely does not love) that these chucklefucks send out emails warning people to be wary of scams, and the domain the emails come from is exactly the kind of bogus domain that a scammer would use.
Also, all the links in the body of the mail point at the equally unverifiable domain "click.e-vanguard.com"
Performative cybersecurity awareness with basic, fundamental errors really frosts my ass.
10/10, no notes.
#Vanguard #cybersecurity #infosec #fail

If you can't figure out how to make your cybersecurity awareness emails originate from your primary domain or a subdomain of it, then you are in no fucking position to be sending out cybersecurity awareness emails and you should sit down and shut up.

Look, all I can tell you is, if you care about the truth regarding #COVID, doing read this article, because it will make steam come out of your ears before you are halfway through it, and then it will get even worse.
This is a completely delusional newspaper publishing completely delusional propaganda based on a completely delusional U.S. House GOP report.
HHS spent $911M on COVID vaccine messaging, 'consistently overstated' virus risk to kids, damning House report finds
https://nypost.com/2024/10/23/us-news/hhs-spent-911m-on-covid-vaccine-messaging-consistently-overstated-virus-risk-to-kids-damning-house-report-finds/

To be clear, the CDC absolutely made a lot of big mistakes, and I'm no fan of how they've handled the pandemic. But much of what this article accuses them of, and much of what this article asserts as facts about COVID, is bullshit Barrington Declaration propaganda which is completely scientifically bogus and continues to be incredibly dangerous.

Is there a version of "cat" without the "wakes owner up in the middle of the night" feature?