The other day my wife mentioned to me that the J&J shot used an adenovirus. I replied that it couldn't be true. One failure of early gene therapy is that the human body raises immunity to the adenovirus vector, and thus, subsequent therapies using adenovirus fail because the body raises a response against it. Also, many people have innate immunity to adenovirus due to prior infection. But it is true. The J&J vaccine uses adenovirus. So people that got J&J either nerfed it because of prior immunity, or will nerf it and possibly all other adenovirus therapies in the future. On a related note, my pal's brother who was terminal and on chemo had a heart attack and died a few hours after his second Pfizer vax. He is unvaccinated, and is understandably fearful after his brother's death. I had to concede to him that it is possible that his brother's heart attack was related. It does put stress on the body and his brother was in very bad shape. I did advise him to get vaccinated however. He is healthy and in his 50s, and I assured him that covid is the greater risk. Hopefully he does. Then two days ago another friend texted that his elderly mother was in the hospital for a mini-stroke. He mentioned that she had her Pfizer booster just two days prior, but not in suspected connection, only that it was a good thing since she was in the hospital. I suspect that these multiple vaccination doses come with a risk for elderly and weakened individuals. It sucks, but nothing is simple. I've had two Moderna shots, and I'll get my booster. We are probably going to face a day when we have hard evidence of vaccination risks, and it is going to be fuel for the anti-vaccination fire. Started to paint something for my daughter's room, but it is starting to look too creepy.
The definite conclusion to "how many hours in a row can I do proper programming work" is 5 and a bit, I say after 9 hours of it. My brain is mush. I'm working on very cool projects, though, which eases the pain a bit. One of them is to basically make the model that predicts the demand for fast/superchargers for half of the Netherlands in 2030, which will be directly used the coming years to find sites and plan for it. As far as impact goes, it's maybe my biggest project yet. Critical Role season 3 is around the corner and I for one am hyped. Anyone else here who watches that? I've been watching Dimension 20 the past few months, here's to find out if I am now ruined forever by Brennan Lee Mulligan's amazing DM-chops.
I started watching/listening to critical rolls first campaign. Still sometimes do before sleep. I read that the later episodes got better production quality, so I might watch those. I read this interesting piece on Hobby Drama about the sudden (or not so sudden) vanishing of Tiberius/Orion Acaba
These days most of my programming is in PostGIS, which is an extension on regular PostgreSQL to enable very powerful geo-functions. Sometimes I write more Python, and in the past year I've also combined the two, writing Python scripts that call the database and send some data back and forth to enjoy the best of both worlds. Today I went back and forth between writing big, heavy queries in a PostgreSQL database, and writing lightweight dynamic queries in Retool. I'm using that for the first time to create an interactive dashboard for a well known client of ours. The other project will probably entail some large tables that show the result of the analysis and a map visualization as an output, which what my deliverables are in most projects.