Category: Misc

Misc

Yesterday I was told by a close family member that there was hardly anything on the shelves at Kroger in Davison. But they must be restocking quickly.

I just went there with my dad. There’s lot of food products. but yes, many shelves are empty. In the fresh fruit and vegetables area, there were a lot of empty shelves. A lot of the lunch meat was gone. The cold shelves, where the beef, pork and chicken is, were largely empty. All the jars of Red Hots were gone, the summer sausage too.

There was no bread. No eggs. Most of the bottled water was gone. We didn’t go down the toilet paper aisle or the hygiene aisle, so I don’t know what they looked like. Apparently, the hoarders have not touched the beer aisle yet. There was plenty of pop and plenty of chips. Plenty of wine.

My dad heard over the speakers while we were there that they just had an order of meat delivered and it was in the back. So, looks like they’re doing what they can to keep from running out.

There were a lot of people, but not as many as I had expected. I didn’t see any craziness. Everyone seemed to be doing their normal shopping.

Misc

We’re going to starve. I’m seeing many pictures of empty stores. Not just the toilet paper is gone. Everything is gone. I’m hearing about people who went grocery shopping for food, so they can, you know, live, and there was no food to be found.

When I said I wasn’t terribly worried about CV-19, I was stupid. I didn’t see the bigger picture. CV-19 is bad. Very bad. In fact, looking at the results now, I’d say it’s about the worse thing that ever happened in modern America.

But it’s not the virus that’s scary. It’s those dumb fucking selfish panicky moronic assholes who are raiding the stores and sweeping up every fucking thing so the rest of us can’t have it. And we’re going to starve.

When the stores have nothing to sell, these dumb fucking morons are going to start robbing other people for those supplies. If Governor Whitmer was smart, she’d cancel the baiting ban and allow hunting-year-round to reduce the number of people who are going to starve.

I’m a little hungry, but I’m on the fence about whether I should eat anything right now, because I feel like I need to make my food last longer.

Misc

Maybe the future is, no one leaves their home.

I’m going to try pulling away from all this now and finally watch the movie “Contagion” that I bought on Amazon the other day.

Misc

I know a lot is happening, but I’m still not any more worried about the virus than I was at the start. I know it’s bad and I know it’s spreading. The results we’re seeing were expected. So, the virus hit some famous people, one who happens to be an NBA player and now NBA is suspended. Probably other professional sports will follow. School sports are already shut down, a lot of people are being told to work from home, etc.

But the virus is not as scary as the people who are panicking.

1,200 people out 300 million is a very small number. But many more people are going to get this virus. There is no vaccine for it, no cure, and there is still so much about it that is not known. Plus, there are no hygiene products to be found, so how are we going to wash our hands?

I stand by what I said before. Most people who get CV-19 will get through it. I could be wrong, though. I’m often wrong. So, who knows?

Misc

I’ve been looking to this map. It shows how the virus is spreading and it updates when there are new cases.

This was a very distracting day. I haven’t been able to stay focused. Earlier today, I bought the movie “Contagion” on Amazon.com and I started watching it, and then I completely forgot about it. Nothing got done today either.

Misc

My Shipt Shopper sent me this picture the other day. I can’t say for sure if it’s related to Coronavirus panic buying, but it could be. She had a lot of trouble filling my order and we had to substitute different items for what I wanted. I had planned to spend around $100, but because so much stuff just wasn’t in the store, I ended up spending much less than that.

People keep telling me that I should be more concerned about CV-19. Well, yeah, sure. I have a reasonable amount of concern about it. I don’t want to catch it and I know it can be very bad for people who I care about it. So, I hope they don’t catch it either.

But I completely agree that the way they are reporting about Coronavirus is very irresponsible. They are the reason for all this panic buying, and people who are insisting that we should be more concerned are contributing to the fear caused by this irresponsible reporting.

Now soap, sanitizer, toilet paper, and all kind of stuff are becoming hard to find. People are buying this stuff up so they can avoid going to the store and coming into contact with someone who is carrying the virus. That leaves a lot of other people unable to find the stuff they need to keep themselves clean and fed.

Eventually, they might start telling us to wash our hands only when absolutely necessary to preserve our soap and sanitizer.

Misc

CV-19 is in Michigan. Run for the hills, and don’t forget the toilet paper.

I’m currently watching Outbreak, and I see that it is popular on Netflix right now.

Any other movies like Outbreak that you can think of?

Misc

The way they’re reporting about Coronavirus, you would think the apocalypse is underway. Those of us, myself included, who aren’t worried about the virus… what if we’re wrong?

Misc

I just got this email from Shipt.com. This is getting ridiculous.

——
Stay well this season.

Our priority is keeping everyone as safe and healthy as possible. Out of an abundance of caution, we’re encouraging our shoppers to drop your items off at your front door, where applicable.

Stocking up on your essentials? Some items may be unavailable due to high demand. We appreciate your patience as we work to fulfill every order with care.

Misc

My website, RobDarnell.com, is back up and running, with higher security and on a better server.

A couple weeks ago my site and its email accounts went down. I contacted my host and they said tens of thousands of spam emails were being sent from my account. At first, they were accusing me of sending spam, they even threatened me with a fee of 50 cents per spam message.

That pissed me off. I’d been with that host for years. I thought they were a great webhost. Before them, I’d been through a few other hosts that I was not happy with. They charged too much and they had shitty customer support.

But the last host, their prices were comfortable, and whenever I had a problem they were very helpful. So, them accusing me of sending spam and threatening me with a fee was a slap in the face. They even said, “We won’t charge you this time, because it was your first offense.”

After a couple of back and forth exchanges with them, I got them to stop accusing me of sending spam. It was assumed that I had been hacked and they were blaming me for getting hacked. They said I should have managed my site better. But then, as we continued discussing it, they said the spam was sent from webmail.

I can’t manage the webmail platform that the host had in place. I don’t have access to their webmail platform. I can’t install security features or anything to their webmail platform. Unless a hacker had my password, it would not have been my fault if webmail was hacked,

It started to dawn on me that I hadn’t seen any signs of spam being sent from either of my email accounts. I checked those accounts a lot. If tens of thousands of spam emails were being sent from my email accounts, I think I would have seen some sign of that.

At some point, they started saying it was six thousand spam emails that were sent, when they had previously said tens of thousands. The more they said, the more I felt that they were full of shit.

I don’t think I was hacked. I’m aware that one of my email addresses and my website was targeted in a spam attack. I think my host shut me down because my email account and website was targeted by Russian spambots, not because spam was being sent from my email accounts.

When these bots attack, they cause an overload on the server and that gets problematic for the host. I did have a security feature on my website to deflect spam comments, but it broke down the day before the host shut my site down, so the spambots got through. The spam folder in the email account was often filling up.

My old host said they couldn’t host my site anymore and I really didn’t want to stay with them after all this. My brother helped me get my site back up. He’s good at this stuff. He designs and manages several websites.

When my brother was going through my database, he found thousands of spam comments that he had to clean out before transferring the site to the new server.

Things seem much better on this new server. For one thing, on this server, I’m able to use some security features that I couldn’t use on the old server. WordPress works better on the new server than it did on the old server. I like the email platform that we have here much better than the one that the old host had. And so on..