Pricks and Hogs
Mar. 8th, 2021 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThe news article I linked to yesterday was another Grumpy Old New Yorker's attempt to navigate the vaccination waters of our fair state. He wound up with a lot of the same frustration I did- finding that some links didn't work at all, others outright lied to you in saying no appointments were available when they were (and vice versa), and, worst of all, feeling the brief elation of having an Very Soon Very Close appointment day suddenly appear before your eyes, only to disappear before you could confirm a time for one on it.
They also keep changing the rules, generally and for specific sites. A few weeks ago, FEMA opened Erie County's second site open to the comorbid (UB's was the first), but it was limited to several residents of zip codes at and around the site which had been underserved by the other sites that required more extensive or private travel. Yet several of our Sunday dog walkers were confirmed there, one living in the same zip as us. Oh, they opened it up, they said. So even though I was now three days away from my own confirmed gift of the jab, it's still a 400 mile round trip and I decided to get back in the Vacc-a-Mole game for a good part of yesterday afternoon to see if I could get in on some closer COVID-fightin' goodness.
From the guy's article, I'd learned some tricks: believe nothing. Get into a rhythm of clicking. Try to suss out when multiple appointments might get loaded in from some faraway site versus just one opening because some other lucky duck got an earlier one and canceled. Most of all, anytime you see something looking like this:
move yo ass fast, because you're up against thousands of other nerds and even bots to grab dat ting dere.
Actually, for that particular site? Take your time. The vaccination site in Potsdam is some Albany epidemiologist's idea of a cruel joke. It is a 350 mile drive from here. It is at least a 350 mile drive from everywhere- except possibly Canada, and that border is closed. Yet it has become the port of last resort for thousands from Buffalo to the tip of Long Island who've braved the miles and the cold and snow to take advantage of the hundreds of available appointments you can seemingly always get there on a day's notice. Maybe the late Yogi Berra planned this one: Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
I, meanwhile, was only mad-clicking the five locations actually closer than the one I'm booked at: the SUNY and FEMA sites here; the one just opened in Batavia that I have NEVER seen even a hint of an opening at; the one in suburban Rochester that will generally pop up a slot or six but only several weeks away; and one in Olean, where I never saw an opening, either.
The two local ones gave me the most false hope. Delevan-Grider showed, for a brief second, a slot tomorrow, gone before I could confirm. UB moved around like a Mexican jumping bean: one tomorrow (gone before a time could be picked), two today (gone and goner), and finally, right before feeding time at the zoo here, FIVE GLORIOUS SHOTS within the hour! This actually makes sense; per a friend who works at the site, between noshows and noneligibles and probably just bad math, they often end the day with more syringes than arms to stick them into. I was ready to leave dinner, the refi paperwork and the original Coming to America all by the otay-side and run over, just to get out of the drive on Wednesday.
Nuthin. But our friend said calling the hotline was more effective, so I tried that. I feel bad for those people, getting calls from probably mostly the computer-illiterate, every one of whom they have to prescreen before they could tell them, as they did me, no, those five shots don't exist now, and they probably never did.
That ended my voyage to the bottom of the syringe. Relief is just over 36 hours away, the weather is supposed to be gorgeous and I've somehow kept the day free up to and well after the appointed time.
It didn't have to be this way, and I've asked the reporter why they didn't do it in a much more logical way:
Every New Yorker has (or can get for free) a my dot ny dot gov online services account. They have them for online tax payment, DMV transactions, Obamacare signup, unemployment- but it's all one account. These vaccination signups should have been tied into that from day one- with an algorithm that said "do you want closest location (within ___ miles), or soonest date (within ____ miles)," and then tied your ONE appointment to your account. If you went back to try again when something opened, it would cancel the one you had. I had to jump through hoops to cancel my April appointment once the sooner one was confirmed- and I bet lots of people either didn't know how to, or outright refused to in case they didn't make their suddenly earlier one.
I'm looking forward to what he finds out.
----
After a rather stressful start to my workday, in an actual suit defending an actual suit in an actual courtroom, I was back in jeans and a sportshirt for the rest of the day. Our refi paperwork has moved along to the next stage, and we're in pretty good shape generally. But dayum this laptop was annoying the shit out of me because of how slow it was running!
Finally, I took a look at what Task Manager had to say:
What, pray, was this AMSE thing eating a ton of my available CPU? THAT's after some fixes, mind: it, whatever "it" was, at the height of its gluttony was taking up more like two thirds of CPU and over a gig of memory space. And unlike just about anything else in Task Manager that can be turned off, Windows waved at me with a cheery "access denied."
On my phone, which was running faster at the time, I learned that when these antivaxxers told Bill Gates to "go fuck himself," his operating system apparently took it literally:
The Antimalware Service Executable process plays an important role in the Windows Defender Service that comes bundled with Windows 10 (and, despite the similarities in name, is completely unrelated to Emsisoft Anti-Malware!). However, it’s also infamous for consuming far more than its fair share of CPU processing power, and can even single handedly reduce your computer’s speed to a glacial crawl.
If you’re a Windows Defender user and have noticed high CPU usage for abnormally long periods of time, you’ll be pleased to know that the issue can easily be resolved.
That turns out to be only partially true, as you can see from the screenshot above. It's MUCH better, though- only sucking a third of CPU, and one of the fixes in that site is to dive deep down into something called the Task Scheduler and disable AMSE when your computer's on battery power. I just did so for the fun of it, and the usage dropped below 10 percent. Other changes will supposedly stop it from starting unless the laptop's been idle for at least an hour. It remains to be seen if this will solve the slowness problem, but it already seems massively improved.
If all else fails, I'll ship the laptop to Potsdam. Maybe it'll freeze all the fucking programs.
Oh hon
Date: 2021-03-09 07:57 pm (UTC)Stay safe!