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Forgot to cook the little potatoes as part of my pasta dinner ...

The weather continues pleasant enough that the dog feels up to a small walkies. Maybe the vet will be merciful about all the weight she must have gained. (The practice has changed hands and location. The new vet loves the dog. Less than five minutes after earnestly lecturing us about the need to cut her rations, she was absentmindedly plying the dog with treats.)

weofodthignen

The grass in front has been raked and last I looked, looked good. I'll probably find tomorrow that it's grown 8" overnight and wildlife have hacked holes in it.

weofodthignen

I flattened the grass in front again; raking tomorrow. Dug up an old potato patch (yield: a dozen very small potatoes, but I let the tiny ones escape), harvested soil and used it to repot a very potbound spider plant that a neighbour had left at the kerb for the taking, then scattered nasturtium seeds, covered, and watered. The dog was amenable, so she got a walkies in the late afternoon.

arlie

I've spent the day installing Proton Mail on 2 computers and one cell phone, importing my mail, calendar, and contacts from gmail, setting my gmail account to forward everything to my new protonmail account, learning to use the email client, configuring what I can, and designing and beginning to implement a new email organization that I expect to work well with these tools.

Advantages:
- Essentially the same UI on the web, on MacOS, on Linux, and on Android.
- Available on Windows, iOS and iPadOS when/if I ever need them
- Open source. If something makes me crazy, I can fix it.
- I like the UI, at least by comparison with other current offerings. It has keyboard shortcuts, ability to use typing a partial name in place of selecting e.g. a folder from a huge scrollable list, and similar nerd (power user) advantages
- Best of all, a built-in, though less general Procmail equivalent. I can apply rules automatically to incoming records, filing them where I want them, including in the spam bucket.
- Built in support for masked email addresses
- Much better privacy than anything Google or even Apple can snoop on.
- Servers in Switzerland; Swiss laws apply.
- Run by a non-profit rather than a profit-maximizing corporation. I expect notably less bad behavior than from any FAANG company, or even most for-profit corporations.
- No more of the damn ads google inflicts on me when I use their interface.
- Should be able to use this to regain control of my previous email address, associated with a domain I now have hosted on DigitalOcean. (My server got blackholed, presumably because of the offenses of a prior user of the same IP address.)

Disadvantages:
- learning curve
- imported my gmail account with everything organized as labels rather than in folders. (Proton mail supports both. Mac Mail and Thunderbird had been presenting gmail's labels as folders, so that's what I'm used to seeing.)
- I lose MacMail's random signature feature, unless I use MacMail to connect to my proton mail account, which would mean using 2 UIs for email.
- Stupid about date formats. I'm stuck with "yesterday", and with "9 PM" - worse, it apparently ignores localization, and always uses US date formats. US date formats are not a problem for me, but it's a large ugly wart, particularly for something not based in the US.
- I'm paying an annual subscription for this. They have a free version, but I wanted some of the non-free features. Moreover, they deserve to be supported.

This is just the mail component of their package of tools. I expect others of their tools to solve other ongoing aggravations - notably I'll be cutting down from 3 password managers, none working on all my devices, to one which will work everywhere. This will make me very happy.

Current Mood: accomplished

weofodthignen

The sun burnt through at mid-morning and it was too hot in the afternoon to take the dog walkies. Instead I hacked away at a couple of bushes in the driveway. I have the greenwaste bin half full.

At lunchtime, Monty and Tabby were facing each other on the fence opposite the kitchen window. Tabby blinked first, and revealed herself to be a gal.

weofodthignen

Monty and Prudence were there again—the garden has been getting another radical trimming at the House of Filet Mignon, so we may be serving as a quieter refuge—but I didn't see Mama Violet today. The sun burnt through around noon and the afternoon was much warmer.

The dog asked me nicely for a walkies, so we toddled around from front garden to front garden till she found the one where she wanted to poop, then came home.

weofodthignen

Back to long sleeves! Today was grey and chilly all day until well after 4:00, when the sun finally broke through, and even then there was a dark cloud hovering. But despite my putting out a load of washing, it never actually rained.

For the second day running, Monty and Prudence were on the porch awaiting breakfast and Mama Violet came by at lunchtime. But today the dog was less eager to go out.

weofodthignen

And back to summery weather. Saw all 3 cats today, and a lot of catfood got eaten. Unfortunately the first foxtails have appeared on grass: long ones in neglected verges and tree pits, a couple of now-removed small ones in our grass.

And something is flowering that's making me sneeze.

weofodthignen

Chron weather guy was right—I was back in long sleeves today.

For some reason the dog was spooked last night. She wanted to go out last minute when I was all ready for bed, and then balked at the top of the steps when the housemate took her out on leash. Then she skulked in my bedroom, facing the door as if she expected some grue to stalk in out of the dark back garden with fangs dripping gore and come for her and me. So I lifted her onto my bed, where she determinedly attached herself to me. She took some time to settle down, first resting her head on my chest, then turning around while digging one paw into my midsection, and for a while she was panting. Finally she decided to curl up with as much of her arse pressed against me as she could. Maybe it was the temperature drop that had already started. Maybe someone's pet iguana or something else odd-smelling was loose within scent range.

weofodthignen

It was indeed more summer than spring weather today. The housemate was annoyed at the dog for requiring the door to be open all afternoon and heating the house up, rather than making the heating run overtime to keep it warm. But the Chronicle forecaster is convinced the weather will be markedly colder tomorrow.

Prudence was hanging about in the front yard, looking very well upholstered.

arlie

As a followup on my More Media Inaccuracy post from one week ago, which was about measles death reporting excluding adults:

1. Your Local Epidemiologist has got the memo. In its latest issue it reports only pediatric flu deaths.

[Edit: Actually, I'm being unfair. A guesstimate of total deaths was sandwiched between 2 statements of total pediatric deaths:

The toll is still being counted: 188 children have died from flu so far this season, with final counts expected to rise as more death certificates are processed. Modeling has estimated that, in total, flu caused 45 million illnesses, 580,000 hospitalizations (including my little girl), and 25,000 deaths this season.

But the big prominent graph was entirely pediatric. End of edit]

2. This measles outbreak is terrible, 4 deaths so far, 2 of them pediatric, and only 3 of them in the United States. Let's all panic. The flu on the other hand has caused 188 pediatric deaths this year - presumably counting only deaths in the United States, but the YLE issue didn't say. We should merely worry about whether the flu vaccine will still be covered by insurance next year.

There are 3 types of reader.
1. Innumerate; notices only the emotional tone. Believes measles is worse, and notices nothing odd.
2. Numerate and observant but not understanding epidemiological math. Sees a gross inconsistency between the emotional tone and the numbers given. Suspects the reporters of anything from incompetence to conspiracy.
3. Has some clue about epidemiological math. Notices the inconsistency; presumes the reason for the greater concern about measles rests on greater potential to get a lot worse very swiftly.

I'm in class 3, except for a certain lack of trust in pundits in general, and suspicion of political motives. I'm aware that hysteria about measles feeds an anti- anti-vax agenda, and thus can be expected to be favored by blue tribers regardless of its accuracy, whereas an anti-flu hysteria does not.

Net result: I'd love to understand epidemiological math well enough to figure out whether the relative emphasis in this latest YLE post is in fact warranted. But I don't, so I have to score a "be wary" point against YLE - maybe they're in the process of (partially) substituting partisanship for reliability.

weofodthignen

The newspaper was unaccountably in a bag—a bag advertising the New York Times. Monty was there, but when I came back from the street with the paper, I saw that Tabby was too. Monty looked at Tabby, who is large, and went under the car. So I took out food for Monty at the side door and called him; he figured it out, appeared, and started eating.

Before it got too hot, I raked where I'd mowed yesterday. Watering tomorrow; and a forecast in the low 80s.

weofodthignen

I clipped out the rest of that patch of clover and long grass (there's still a smaller patch on the other side of the garden), mowed, swept the driveway and pavement, and later blóted for Éostre.

The California poppies are still going strong. One is flowering in a crack in the pavement next to a busy road. Yer Calif. suburbia, right there.

weofodthignen

I have started to take out the clover in the large mound in the smaller area of grass in back. It was already producing burrs, so it was time. I hope to mow that area by the end of the weekend. Then I finished running the sprinklers.

In the early evening I was washing up and noticed Monty snoozing on the neighbours' shed roof, and Prudence walking along the fence; I was about to take them out a dish of food when suddenly they both looked around and then jumped down. Apparently feeding time at the House of Filet Mignon :-)

weofodthignen

Another thing about living in the suburbs ... the other day I passed a house where 2 pit bulls, a white one and a brown one, loaf in the front garden (well, Astroturfed dog play area) for much of the day. (There's also a huge dog bed on the porch, but I haven't seen it being used.) The fence and gate are chainlink, and the dogs sometimes rear up, put their paws on the top of the fence and bark at passers-by. It's probably to ask to be petted, but I wouldn't dare. That time, the dogs were outside but the house door was closed, and an Amazon delivery person was standing there looking perplexed. Hope he managed to make the delivery without either breakage or tooth marks to the goods or his person.

weofodthignen

The orange that fell yesterday was so ripe it split badly and started to rot immediately, so it had to go straight to compost. Got myself one that was slightly less ripe.

The dog continues to enjoy being allowed to loaf on the grass. My sheets are now white, so they display the resulting bits of grass and mud ...

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