Covid update (3)

It came through the house again. Several of Grandma's caregivers got it and I got it. But Grandma, and my wife and daughter were spared.

I spent my quarantine in the spare bedroom which is where my home office is set up in any case. Comfortable furnishings, a big picture window, and various internet equipped devices. About as good as sitting in one room for a week-and-a-half can be. Mild case. After all, I'd already had it and was vaccinated and boosted. I got a lot of work done and a little on my side projects, too.

My wife's long-covid persists. She'd been making good progress (and is at least burning through a lot less supplemental oxygen), but in the fall she got first her flu shot then her Covid booster and each one set her back a week or so on her exercise. Then my folks came, then her folks, and, and, and. She was just starting to get back up to speed on exercise when I got sick and she suddenly got a bunch of worked dropped on her. Sigh.

Blockchain toasters?

During the original web boom, there were lots of great new ideas floating around but also a bunch of "internet toasters". That is ideas that came down to "we'll attach this [THING] to the internet and good stuff will magically happen" where toasters were used as the exemplar of the class of object which gained little by being connected to the internet.

Web2.0 had much the same thing allowing that we replaced "connect to the internet" with "build a social network community around". Of course that worked (and to the tune of huge amounts of money) for some notions, but it also failed for others. I don't recall if anyone called them "social toasters" but they should have.

Today I'm seeing a number of things along the lines of "we'll use blockchains to track/validate/protect/whatever" various kinds of data (often in the form of "let's make a NFT out of it!"). Given the math behind blockchains, I imagine that most of these notions are technologically feasible, but I wonder how many of them are blockchain toasters?