Here we go for round two of #PanCholLiveToot!

Regarding yesterday's poll <https://federate.social/@jik/115216580243925705>, which there's still time to participate in if you haven't already , I just want to say there's obviously a third option I didn't offer in the poll because everyone who doesn't _love_ cooking would probably have picked it: "good food cooked and cleaned up by others".
Indeed, my definition of a perfect vacation is a week of good food cooked and cleaned up by others.
#PanCholLiveToot

Today's adventure in computing while trapped in a hospital for a clinical trial…
My computer at home, which is also my SSH jump box and the backup server for my home network, appears to have crashed. D'oh!
I'm going to have to walk my son through rebooting it this evening, which is complicated, because I brought its keyboard with me to the hospital, and booting requires a long encryption password which is normally provided by the YubiKey that's on a chain around my neck.
#PanCholLiveToot

My #PanCholLiveToot friends, I just got some very good news!
No cholera vaccine bacteria were detected in yesterday's sample. This is good for me personally and for the #PanChol vaccine in general.
For me personally, it means there's a good chance I'll be able to go home before the weekend. If today's sample comes back clean tomorrow, then they'll probably start me on prophylactic doxycycline tomorrow and send me home Friday.
(continued)

And while I'd be happy to go home before the weekend, I'm even happier about what this might mean about the efficacy of the vaccine.
If there's no detectable vaccine bacteria in my samples, that likely means the antibodies my body created in response to the original vaccine dose I took last November successfully killed off the booster vaccine bacteria I drank on Monday.
(continued)
#PanCholLiveToot

In other words, THE VACCINE WORKED.
At least, it did for me; it's important to note that two others who preceded me through this trial phase had vaccine detected in their samples so they had to stay longer.
(Now I am wondering if COVID may have something to do with this. We know COVID damages the immune system. I've only had COVID once, but anybody else going through this trial who isn't as COVID-cautious has probably had it multiple times. Will that mess up the study? Hmm.)
#PanCholLiveToot

OK, so, with my son's help as my eyes and hands at home I've figured out why my home computer dropped off the network and fixed it so it won't happen again. This is a crossover #PanCholLiveToot / #TechIsShitDispatch post.
Apparently at some point in the last ten years, the US and EU enacted power-saving regulations for computers which essentially require them to sleep by default when no one is using them.
Because of this, Debian is configured by default to sleep after 20 minutes of idle time.
…

I'm typically logged in all the time on my computer, and I have GNOME configured never to sleep, so this isn't usually a problem. However, earlier today my GNOME session crashed (that's the first shitty tech thing), and twenty minutes later, the GDM greeter put my computer to sleep.
The second shitty aspect of this is that there's no user-friendly way to prevent this from happening. There's literally been a GNOME bug ticket open about this for 7+ years.
Ref: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/22
…

OK, so, with my son's help as my eyes and hands at home I've figured out why my home computer dropped off the network and fixed it so it won't happen again. This is a crossover #PanCholLiveToot / #TechIsShitDispatch post.
Apparently at some point in the last ten years, the US and EU enacted power-saving regulations for computers which essentially require them to sleep by default when no one is using them.
Because of this, Debian is configured by default to sleep after 20 minutes of idle time.
…

I dug around a bit to figure out the non-user-friendly way of preventing this from happening again. I ended up making two changes, either one of which is probably sufficient by itself, just to be extra-paranoid:
1) I modified /etc/gdm3/greeter.dconf-defaults to disable sleep from the login screen.
2) I completely masked all the sleep and hybernate targets in systemd to prevent them from ever being invoked: `sudo systemctl mask sleep.target suspend.target hibernate.target hybrid-sleep.target`.

I know y'all are really here to read about the bad hospital food, so…
Last night and tonight I ordered pre-packaged kosher meals instead of meals cooked by the hospital kitchen, so I could have some meat and because I wasn't interested in the entrées on the menu.
Last night's pot roast was decent, but the meat portion was too small.
Tonight's chicken dinner (pictured below) was terrible. The potatoes were disgusting, and the meat serving size was even smaller than last night's.
#PanCholLiveToot

I've been eating pre-packaged kosher meals for decades, so I can say with confidence that this is shrinkflation in action. They've dramatically reduced how much food they're putting in these meals, and I'm sure they haven't reduced the prices to match!
According to Sodexo, my meal had only 390 calories, certainly not enough for an adult. So this isn't just an economic issue, it's also a health issue.
#PanCholLiveToot

Look, I'm not saying I just ate the whole 8 ounce block of cheese I brought from home to the hospital, and I'm not saying I _didn't_ just eat the whole 8 ounce block of cheese I brought from home to the hospital, but there's an empty cheese wrapper sitting on the tray table next to me, so draw your own conclusions.
#PanCholLiveToot