Friday Hodgepodge

Friday, May 07, 2021

Four Wins, of Various Sizes

The below are gleaned from a recent review of my daily "wins log."

1. I got my second Pfizer/BioNTech shot about a month ago. Thank you, Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci!

In the past, they focussed on developing cancer therapies, essentially by programming cells to produce therapeutic proteins. For a decade, their company had never brought a product to market. During a 2018 conference of infectious disease experts in Berlin, Prof. Sahin made a bold statement: that his company might be able to use its "messenger RNA technology" to rapidly develop a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic.
That goes for my wife, too. Despite the fact that I had signed up for two different waiting lists, the one she found got me a shot faster than I was even notified by the other two.

Image by GetĂșlio Moraes, via Unsplash, license.
2. Thanks to my slow, patient garage terraform, I was ready to house a golf cart that my in-laws gave us after moving nearby, recently.

The development we live in was built with golf carts in mind, and it's nice to have one. I dropped the kids off at school today with it, and I won't miss the car line, at least on days that are nice enough to use one. The fresh air was a pleasant change of pace, too.

3. Owing to the move, we got to entertain at home for the first time in ages. The menu was simple: grilled steak, some of Publix's excellent coleslaw, and potatoes baked this way. Those are always a crowd-pleaser.

4. Need to encrypt a PDF? I never actually needed to until recently, and I don't own expensive editing software. I now know of an easy way to do it. I use the second method listed. I'm a Linux guy, but I believe the software, QPDF, is multi-platform.

-- CAV

3 comments:

Snedcat said...

Happy Friday! Here's an excellent video from a channel of classical guitar that is also an excellent advertisement for an instrument maker's wares.

And I don't think I have sent you any of Asa's music (I gave my nephew one of her albums a couple years ago, so that's interfering with my recall); she's my favorite contemporary Nigerian singer. This is a more political song of hers; this is a catchy dive into the 60s with a great video. (Her stage name Asa, pronounced like Asha, means "hawk" in Yoruba, which she also sings in. Lyrics translated in the second comment.)

And a couple of good ska songs to round out the weekend. This is Madness with some entertaining socio-political humor, and the latest YT video by a group I pointed you to recently.

Snedcat said...

Yo, Gus, as for No. 2, that reminds me of an entertaining grad school meet and greet I went to once, where I was one of several people chatting with two German guys starting business school. They were talking once about all the girlfriends they had in college back in Germany because of their stylish ways, and one of the women laughed, "So you two were rather competitive then?" and one of them indicated the two of them with his thumb and said, "Oh, we had no competition." Later they joked that they were going to buy a golf cart, and one of them said, "Yes, we'll install a refrigerator in the back and a stereo to "go cruising for chicks." The other said, "And fuzzy dice from the rear view mirror, so we can pimp our ride." The first added, "And I'll make a few adjustments to the motor. The police won't be able to catch us." His friend replied, "When they finally pass us 15 minutes later, we'll just look at them confused and say, 'Officer, this is a golf cart! How could we be speeding?'"

Gus Van Horn said...

Snedcat,

Thanks for the links and the golf cart story.

The image of fuzzy dice on a golf cart is so funny I am now tempted...

Gus