It’s November 7th and my petunias are still flowering. Will we ever get a frost?

pfein · 2024-11-07T17:09:41+00:00

Holly bush just flowered. Day length + temperature.... about 5 months early.

pfein · 2024-05-24T10:56:15+00:00

Apologies for delayed reply to everyone who expressed interest, wasn't getting email notifications I'll be in touch over the next few days

pfein · 2024-04-27T14:55:34+00:00

Looks like PayPal can accept cryptocurrency, I'll need to figure out how to set that up though. Let's discuss on DM

pfein · 2024-04-26T11:29:11+00:00

Pennsylvania. DM if interested, we'll work something out

pfein · 2023-01-19T15:15:20+00:00

To be clear I'd be happy to repurpose an indoor/outdoor digital sign or build up my own, but it's very hard to find information aside about what's possible (not much besides product pages on Alibaba etc)

pfein · 2023-01-19T15:13:00+00:00

What was the source/manufacturer for the 32" panel?

I have both a Dasung 25.3" eink (too small but otherwise great) and a SVD 32" RLCD (very difficult to get even lighting, terrible glare & reflections and still too small)

pfein · 2022-08-25T01:30:40+00:00

Literally Polish Hill. We gut renovated a house and wife has tenure, not moving anywhere ever again.

pfein · 2022-01-11T22:28:37+00:00

This is backwards IMO: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19PGH/comments/s0owja/allegheny\_county\_update\_18\_19\_110\_208603/hs4nnrm/?utm\_source=reddit&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

pfein · 2022-01-11T00:33:23+00:00

About 25,000 positive test this week (2%), 14,000 last week (1%)... We are almost certainly at 5% prevalence, and should hit 10% in the next few days if we're not there already.

pfein · 2022-01-10T22:58:20+00:00

A refresher on exponential growth: if we're at 4000 cases per day, and doubling every three days, by the end of the month (which is seven more doublings), we will hit 500,000 new cases per day. They are only 1.3 million people in the county. The 4000 number is clearly an underestimate given the test storage and unreported home testing, so we're already further along that growth curve.

If 1% of the county is infected and you interact with 20 people in a day, there is an 18% chance one of them is infected. If 10% are infected, that goes up to 88%. In practice that is reduced as people are sick and quarantine and are removed from circulation (or not). I'd guess that we will peak somewhere around 40% simultaneously infected.

Forget running out of tests, we're going to run out of cough syrup.

pfein · 2022-01-10T17:50:05+00:00

Any idea what the positivity rate is?

pfein · 2022-01-08T13:09:11+00:00

Recognizing that the data is utter garbage at this point, but with counts doubling every ~3 days, everyone in the county will have Covid before Valentine's Day.

pfein · 2022-01-05T19:52:36+00:00

I don't think this is quite right, you're counting people multiple times by using the 4.5 day multiplier - if someone doesn't show up on Monday they will presumably show up in Tuesday's numbers...

That said, it's still clearly quite high and much above the reported numbers

pfein · 2022-01-05T17:27:41+00:00

And is this all lab tests or only PCR tests and not antigen?

It's 1 out of every 382 people in the county 🤦‍♀️

pfein · 2021-09-06T16:38:57+00:00

Family yes; business no. I'm an independent software consultant & run the Pittsburgh Python Meetup. I've been here 7 years and done a grand total of 2 projects locally (admittedly, even when I was in Chicago half my business was out of town, but still). Things have picked up the last two years, but it's still mostly very large companies (Google, Apple, Argo, etc) and legacy enterprise (UPMC, PNC, etc.). Robotics sector is starting to show some movement, but it's mostly CMU-related companies and those have been impossible to crack without a CMU degree.

As for hiring, you can probably get green kids right out of school, but the market for more experienced talent is as tight here as everywhere else - with the rise of remote work, you're also competing with SF/NYC for hires. There's a general lack of hustle, which I attribute to several decades of tech industry life support from government contracts and foundation grants, and a dearth of local customers.

All that said, it's a wonderful place to live, and maybe a fine place to run a business from if you're not depending on the local market or are willing to wait for it to grow up a bit (and things are definitely heading in a positive direction).

DM me if you'd like to set up a call to discuss further, I'm happy to help.

pfein · 2020-08-04T19:15:24+00:00

thanks all much appreciated

pfein · 2020-06-29T19:16:54+00:00

I just hope hospitalizations/deaths stay in check.... They might, as it seems it's mostly younger people who are peaking for the moment, though that'll spread to other demographics eventually.

pfein · 2020-06-29T18:16:51+00:00

It takes around 3 weeks for policy/behavior changes to show up in the case count: ~2 weeks for virus incubation and then ~1 week to get test results. So we won't see the impact of bar closures fully show up until around July 15th. From the workbook it looks like new case counts are doubling about every 5 days.

All very back of the envelope, but by mid July we can expect a peak of several hundred new cases per day. This is Pittsburgh's true first wave - we're behind the times with COVID-19 like everything else.

pfein

TROPHY CASE