Best Computer Mouse

I have many computer pointing devices at home. From mice, trackpads, to even trackballs. Some are wired and some are wireless. The one in the picture above is just called IntelliMouse Optical USB and PS/2 Compatible. Yes, PS/2. I remember it came with a green USB to PS/2 adapter plug. I think it must be at least twenty years old. Despite its age, the IntelliMouse is still the best performing mouse I own. It has four small silicone pads that allow the mouse to glide over surfaces. The construction feels very solid, and the buttons have exceptionally good tactile feedback. It even has two extra buttons that are usually used for page forward and page back on websites. If you look on eBay, used mice for this model still sells more than some new mice on Amazon. I think it will last forever.

Erewhon Smoothie

A friend posted on Instagram that she finally tried a smoothie from Erewhon. For those that do not know, Erewhon is a market chain in Los Angeles that makes Whole Foods look like a 99-cent store. I jokingly asked her if it was a $30 smoothie, and she said I was close.

$22! That seems very expensive for a smoothie. If you look at the ingredients list, the word “organic” shows up eleven times. That is $2 per original ingredient. My friend said it was pretty good. I have been making smoothies at home for the past ten weeks for my diet/exercise program with frozen fruit from Costco. I probably spent less than 50 cents per cup. Probably not all “organic” though.

Retirement

Photo by Eda Yurtkuran on Pexels.com

I just turned fifty-five about a month ago. When I was young, I thought fifty-five was the retirement age and when you started getting senior discounts. However, it seems that age has been pushed to sixty-five or even sixty-seven. Anyway, due to mostly luck, the equity I was given at my current job is more than enough for me to retire.

At work, I have been dropping hints for the past year about retirement. By now, I feel most of the coworkers I am close to know that I plan to walk away at the beginning of 2024. This includes my manager; we have worked together for about twenty years. Of course, the most obvious question is “What are you going to do after you retire?” The answer right now is “I don’t know.”

I do feel like I need to find a part-time job, pick up a hobby, or volunteer for stuff. Otherwise, I will just lie in bed or sit at home in front of a computer. I usually say that I will travel, but being old and single, I do not know how many trips I can take before the lonliness becomes unbearable. I have already balked at the first travel opportunity. My cousin is getting married in Taipei over Christmas. For many months, I thought I was going to attend, even by myself if no one else from my family was going. Over time, I felt this dread of going to Taiwan by myself until I finally RSVPed that I cannot attend. What if I feel this way before every trip? That will take away a large portion of my post-retirement plans. Sigh…

Rest In Peace

I found out today that my nephew passed away this past weekend. I am not 100% sure about the details, but my mom said he had a massive stroke and was left in a vegetative state, and the decision was made to take him off life support. Ugh.

The first time I met my nephew was when I picked him up from LAX. He was accepted into the master’s program for Electrical Engineering at UCLA after graduating from college in China. I still remember taking him to get housing and telling him to open a bank account as soon as possible. He had a huge wad of $100 bills. He graduated from UCLA, found a job in the Bay Area. I helped him with some material for his green card application and he just recently received it. I also heard he recently got a girlfriend and bought a house. He was living the American Dream.

I am not sure what is happening now. His parents will probably come to the US and take his body home to China. I think he is only thirty years old. So sad.

Costco Baijiu

Costco is selling baijiu.

Baijiu literally means white liquor and it is an evil tasing liquor from China. Typically, baijiu is distilled from sorghum, but other grains can be used, like rice or wheat. It has really high alcohol content, often over 50%. I have not seen the brands that Costco is selling. The most famous brand out there is Maotai:

I tried baijiu several times in China, usually during business dinners. It tastes horrible and burns. I image it would be like drinking acetone or paint thinner.

No More Roommate (updated)

For the past ten weeks, I had a roommate living in my house. Since I did not charge rent or anything, it was more like a house guest. The daughter of long-term friends received a summer internship in Orange County, and my house was closer to the company location. In preparation, my parents and I cleared out one of the spare bedrooms. In addition to moving my heavy adjustable bed into the room, I also purchased several items of furniture: dresser, desk, nightstand, end table, and two lamps. My friends bought the office chair and left it for me.

The house guest mostly kept to herself and spent the night somewhere else for about one-quarter of the time. She did not cook very much, and usually ate in the bedroom. She was very unintrusive, but it was still an inconvenience to have a non-family person stay with you. Now I have a fully furnished empty room in my house.

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Updated: Monday, August 28th @7:40 pm

It is strange. Even though I only interacted with my house guest three or four times over the ten weeks, I feel more alone once she moved out. Maybe it is the knowledge that someone else is in the next room? It was only ten weeks but I feel I need to readjust to living alone again.

10,000 Unread Emails

This is the default home screen on my iPhone:

Each time someone sees my screen, they always make a comment on the number of unread emails, text messages, or missed calls. Most of these items show up on the notifications page, where I can see the first few lines of content. For Gmail, the count also includes the Social and Promotional inboxes, which I rarely check. I do not believe I have missed any important messages, even though the unread count is a bit ridiculous.

COVID-19 Resurgence?

I did not think I would write another post about COVID-19, yet here we are again. I have not heard much news about COVID after China imploded from the sudden end to their zero-COVID policy. However, it does look like there is a slight increase in cases in the US. Here is Orange County data for new cases:

New cases for all time
New cases for last twelve months

From the top chart, the number of new cases seems flat when compared to the past spikes in cases. If you zoom in to the past twelve months, there is a rise in cases since the summer. Will that continue, flatten out, or even decrease? I heard there may be a new vaccine out in September. Is this rise due to the long wait since the last approved booster?

Additionally, it has become harder to find COVID data. I used to use occovid.com or the New York Times page. I believe occovid.com has been shut down, or at least I cannot connect to the site anymore. The previous NYT COVID page stopped updating in March 2023, and the new page needs a login.

Ukraine War

My ENGin student’s father got conscripted into the Ukrainian military over the weekend. He is 57 years old. I believe all males 18-60 are eligible for the draft and my student is also waiting to be called. This is terrible news.

Hurricane Hilary (Plus Earthquake)

Hurricane Hillary has mostly been a dud here in Southern California. Here are the precipitation map from last night and right now:

The storm has moved north, but the rain intensity has dropped off dramatically.

I think it is because the storm took a northwest path, so it came across the colder Pacific Ocean instead of the warmer waters of the Gulf of California. Hurricanes and tropical storms will lose strength as it travels over land or cooler water. It has been raining on and off since last night but has not been that heavy. It is also not that windy outside

I did move my car out of the garage onto the driveway so the rain can rinse off months of dirt and dust.

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As if a hurricane/tropical storm was not enough fun, I just received an earthquake warning for a 5.5 quake in Ventura County. My phone sounded a strange alarm, and a voice told me to drop and take cover. It has been about five minutes and I have not felt anything yet.

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Whoa! The earthquake warning was legit. I just did not feel anything.

Noisy Clan Quiz

I purchased a circle of fifths wheel on Amazon from a company called Noisy Clan. There are several versions, and I got the cheap one that comes with an e-book instead of a printed book. Anyway, since I am on their mailing list, I have been getting emails from them regularly.

The latest email was about chord progressions and mood, but also included a quiz:

I took the quiz and only got one right. My answers were: 1) do not know, 2) Vivaldi, 3) violin, 4) Aretha Franklin, 5) White Album. Here were the answers posted:

So, I got question #4 right. But wait, Mozart composed the Four Seasons? I could have sworn it was Antonio Vivaldi.

Since the email asked for feedback, I sent Noisy Clan an email questioning their answer for question #2. I have not received a response, nor do I expect one. They probably got an email from each person that bothered to read the email quiz.

Wasting Paper

My sister just found a new job. Since she is mostly working from home (company office is in New York City), they sent her new computer equipment. When you work from home and get fired or quit, usually the company just wants the notebook computer back; they let the ex-employee keep all the other IT stuff. Well, my sister has worked from home in her past three or four jobs, so she has a lot of extra computer peripherals. This time is no different, so I was able to get a USB camera and a headset.

The camera is a Microsoft LifeCam 3000, and in the packaging was a 177-page booklet written in twenty-nine languages. This seems like a huge waste of paper as the information is not even that important. Maybe this is a regulatory requirement? Interestingly, languages include both traditional and simplified Chinese, Korean, and Thai, but no Japanese. Does Microsoft not sell webcams in Japan?

SPR Weight Loss

Last November, I signed up for a program called Omada through my online pharmacy. I posted about it here. The goal was to eat healthy and exercise to lose weight. I believe I posted a few things the first week, then promptly ignored the rest of the emails. I kept weighing myself and the mobile connected scale kept track. Here is my weight history. The original goal was probably lose 5% of my weight.

I started the SPR program on July 10th, which is the last high spike before the large drop. In three weeks, I have lost twelve pounds or about four pounds a week. My first goal was actually 200 pounds so if I keep losing weight at the same rate, I may be able to hit the forty-pound weight loss goal. Likely the weight loss will slow but I would be happy if I lost another fifteen pounds. That would bring me to 215 pounds or thirty off my high.

As for the program, I am still having issues with my burned fingers, and now my fistula is hurting. I can still feel the “thrill” a bit, but I cannot hear the fistula anymore. I hope it is temporary; I do not want to visit the vascular surgeon at this point post-transplant.

Hearing Loss

I just got back from my sister’s house. Only my younger niece was home, and she said there was something beeping. She could not locate the source, so my sister called me to go and take a look. When I got there, I could not hear any beeping. My niece said that it was high pitched and soft. My sister also said she could hear it over the phone. I finally noticed a display in the fridge that showed alarm and flashing 0°F for the freezer. I managed to turn off the unheard alarm, but noticed the freezer items were not very cold.

I have noticed that I am having more trouble understanding female coworkers. Usually, certain words or phrases are either muffled or too soft. I did notice that other people seem to have few problems understanding the same conversation. I think I do have high frequency hearing loss since this happens less when I listen to male voices. I am unsure why I am getting this since I am not usually near loud sound sources.

Maybe it is age based. Getting old sucks.

Apple Health Export

I reconnected all my health providers to Apple Health again this morning. I think the connections are time-limited, so you need to reauthorize access periodically. It took a long time to update. I also noticed an “export to PDF” option so I let my iPhone generate the report for all lab results from everywhere for all time. The result was a 616-page PDF. 😱

Western Digital Drive Failure

I have a home NAS to store videos, music, photos, and random personal files. I wrote about the issues I had adding a second 6 TB hard drive previously. The transfer speed seemed awfully slow, and any mistakes take forever to fix. Well, not the second drive I purchased has failed. I set up the NAS as RAID 0 so it writes data across both drives. This speeds up performance, but there is no redundany. I do have all the data backed up using HyperBackup, but it uses a proprietary file format so I am not 100% confident I can restore the data if I just wipe out the NAS.

To be sure, I purchased a 8 TB external storage hub from Costco. It cost me $150 but I was able to copy over all my data. It took about four days to copy 7 TB of movies to the backup drive, plus two more days for smaller volumes for music and photos. After all the data was backed up, twice, I tried to create a new data pool with the existing drives, but received warnings that there were too many bad blocks on the second drive.

At this point, I realized that the second drive was still under Western Digital’s 3-year warranty. I pulled up the Amazon invoice, screenshotted the error messages, and filed a warranty claim online. A reply came quick, but they wanted me to put the drive in an external enclosure, download test software, run tests, and send in results. I do not have such an enclosure, so I purchased one from Amazon. As I am waiting for it to arrive, I received an email from WD saying that I have not responded with test results, and they will close my ticket after 24 hours. I will be very pissed if I am still waiting for the enclosure, I had to buy to test their failed drive.

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If WD rejects my warranty claim and I must buy another drive, I am going with Seagate. I wonder if their warranty claim process is as burdensome on the customer as Western Digital.

SPR Low Blood Sugar

I posted about two weeks ago about a low blood sugar event while driving to my friends’ house. Well, after starting the SPR program, the problem is getting worse. Overall, it is good that my blood sugar is averaging much lower, but the extreme lows are scary. I received a critical low blood sugar warning Thursday on the way to work:

The reading actually got down to 53 on a prior scan. That is really low. I was brought to the ER when my blood sugar dropped to below 40 post-heart transplant. I mentioned this to my nephrologist yesterday and she said I should taper down my Toujeo insulin shot until my morning blood glucose is over 100.

After fighting high blood sugar, especially after the kidney transplant, it is refreshing to see a consistently normal blood sugar reading, especially with less insulin shots.