22 July

The curious case of my covid-induced loss of taste and smell

I’m writing this mainly for my own future reference, as I’m sure my memory of some of these details will vanish, much like my ability to smell onions has vanished this month.

I’m not sure how I (finally, after avoiding it successfully for 3 1/2 years) got covid. I know it’s more likely that I was exposed first, even though my wife tested positive several days before I did. It was probably the last weekend in June, when I subbed in a pit orchestra for a musical theater performance on Saturday, and then had a big band rehearsal on Sunday. I was in the presence of a lot of people over those two days, whereas my wife had not interacted with many people in the previous week.

On Monday I had an achy, fitful, mostly sleepless night, and was feeling run down for most of Tuesday morning, but by afternoon I was fine, and thought no more of it. Then on Thursday night, my wife got knocked out with a sudden fever and fatigue that we foolishly did not assume was covid, but the next morning she tested, and it was positive. She started isolating, but we both knew it was probably too late.

Although I felt totally fine, I started testing daily and was repeatedly negative. But that Sunday night I once again was achy and fitful, this time with chills added to the mix. I thought for sure I must have covid, but I still tested negative the next morning. On Tuesday I finally did test positive, even though — other than those two random nights, six nights apart — all I was feeling were the mildest imaginable cold symptoms. Those lingered for about a week, and that was pretty much it.

Except.

I believe it was that Thursday or Friday, a few days after I first tested positive, and was mostly already feeling fine again, that I noticed that most distinctive and curious of covid symptoms beginning to appear: I was rapidly losing my sense of taste and smell.

Mostly smell, honestly, but of course the two senses are linked. I noticed initially that I basically couldn’t smell anything, but I hadn’t completely lost my sense of taste. Sweet and sour were both maybe around 30% of their normal levels, and bitter (hurrah) was pretty much entirely unaffected. (Salty and umami were, for the moment, gone.)

It has now been over two weeks since I noticed the problem, and to some extent my senses have returned. I can now smell some things, and I can taste pretty much everything. But I am realizing that the loss has been very selective. In particular, I can smell many mild scents almost as normal, but strong odors, like raw onions, are almost completely undetectable.

Put it this way: I am the type of person whose eyes normally burn painfully and water copiously when cutting raw onions. But last week I cut an onion in half, put it right up to my nose, and inhaled as deeply as I could, and… well, there was an ever-so-slight suggestion of “onion.” But not only could I not smell it at all if it was more than a millimeter from my face, but I didn’t get any of the eye watering, either. My sensation of that particular volatile compound is just totally dead.

My sense of taste has fared better, as I can now pretty much taste everything — again, except onions — but I’ve noticed that certain things don’t taste like they’re “supposed” to, or that the tastes I perceive are only vague and indistinct. I can tell I’m tasting something, but I’m not sure what it is.

I think that comes back to the deadening of the “volatile compounds” sensation. It’s the complex flavors made from combinations of ingredients that are being affected. I’m only getting the broad strokes. Indian curries still taste good to me, but all the nuances of the layered spices are missing.

Which takes me back to about 10 days ago, when I first noticed there was one thing I could taste fully, just as it has always tasted to me.

Ketchup.

I guess ketchup is essentially a fairly simple blend of sweet and acidic, without much nuance. (That’s probably why kids like it.) And since those senses never totally went away, it’s not surprising that would be something I could taste fully. For a few days, I put a lot of ketchup on most of the things I ate.

I haven’t spent a lot of time investigating other people’s stories of their covid experiences, but I’m wondering if most people who reported loss of taste and smell had this kind of “selective” loss the way I did. I assume that’s the case. And then, of course, I wonder why covid causes this loss of sensation of, most specifically, the kinds of odors that are more or less nature’s warning bells for things that are possibly dangerous to consume or be exposed to. It’s not like covid has a “plan,” but I wonder if this particular symptom has manifested because it gives covid some kind of environmental advantage that helps it spread, or if it’s just a random quirk, a side effect of the chaotic nature of viral mutation and evolution.

Anyway… I am thankful for the vaccines, which I am sure contributed to how mild my case of covid was, and probably prevented me from catching it at all before July 2023. And I’m thankful that other than a couple of bad sleeps, my symptoms were extremely tolerable. This smell/taste thing has been, more than anything, a curiosity to observe and study. But it is starting to get a bit old, so I’m hoping my senses fully return sooner rather than later.

I do realize of course that, although I think it’s unlikely, the loss may be permanent or semi-permanent. And so there, too, I am thankful that I have not completely lost these senses, because I can certainly live with things the way they are. I just might die early from eating something that’s gone rancid and I couldn’t tell. Ç’est la vie.

Update: Of course, after writing this, I did research the matter a bit, and it affirmed that I should never do that. I hadn’t considered, until now, that I am on a journey of recovery of these senses, and that possibly, months from now, I will enter a stage where I do regain my sense of smell, but everything will be distorted and unpleasant. Ugh. On a more helpful note, that Scientific American article does talk specifically about chemical sensing, which is different from sense of smell. This seems to be the essence of my loss; I could not sense the minty freshness of toothpaste at all for a few days. That is starting to come back, as well as my ability to sense hot peppers.

Is T-Mobile bypassing local ad blockers when using your hotspot?

I hate online ads.

That could be the end of the post, but sadly it’s not.

I understand that sites need ad revenue to function. But the online advertising ecosystem is so fundamentally broken that I refuse to participate in it, even to the detriment of the sites whose content I value. It’s possible to run a sustainable business through ads without ruining your site visitors’ experience.

There are various tools you can use to block the most obnoxious ads, but I’ve taken a very direct, hands-on approach. I’ve actually taken the time to view source on sites I visit that go overboard with ads, identify the domain names of the ad servers, and add them to my Mac’s /etc/hosts file so they resolve to localhost (127.0.0.1), effectively killing any ads from those sources.

And it works. I often see “broken image” icons, but all of those hideous animated ads screaming at my eyeballs are gone.

Except when I’m tethering to my phone’s hotspot.

Somehow, when I use my T-Mobile hotspot instead of my home wifi, all of those ads come flooding back. What. Is. Happening.

The only explanation I can think of is that T-Mobile is somehow using a proxy to bypass my local hosts file, but I though the local file always trumped anything else.

I don’t have an answer. But I don’t like it. And perhaps more importantly, if T-Mobile is doing this, what else is it doing with the data I’m sending and receiving over its network?

“Fake Steve Jobs” on the true cost of Chinese manufacturing

I often complain about how just about everything is made in China these days. It’s about the exploitation of workers for the sake of cheaper goods. Well, in case you didn’t hear about it, a worker at the Chinese factory that makes iPhones committed suicide recently because he lost a prototype fourth-generation iPhone. And why did he commit suicide over this? Because he was apparently being tortured by his employers (Foxconn) over it. Presumably because this is the kind of mistake that might cost Foxconn their lucrative contract with Apple.

What was that factory worker’s life worth? Less than Foxconn’s iPhone manufacturing contract? Less than Apple’s potentially stolen trade secrets?

“Fake Steve Jobs” has posted a blog entry on the matter. If you’ve never read his blog before, the tone may be a bit shocking to you, but cut through the parody and there are a couple of paragraphs here that are probably the best critique ever of our reliance on cheap Chinese labor to manufacture the high-tech, low-cost devices we consume so voraciously:

Well, this is the world we are living in. These are the people we are dealing with. This is how we have to deal with them. We can’t make these products in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did. And, frankly, the quality would be about half what we get out of China. But these guys play rough. They really do. They are not nice people. And, though we talk a good game about how we insist on workers being treated with dignity, blah blah blah, well, I mean, come on. Have you ever been to China? We have. We’ve been to China. We know what goes on there. We know how they open your mail, and listen to your phone calls, and let their factories pollute like crazy and exploit workers, all in the name of progress. And we turn a blind eye to it. We let them know when we’re coming to visit, and they give us a tour and put on a little show of how great things are, and how wonderful the dorm life is, and afterward we pretend to keep an eye on them — but it’s all theater. It is. We know it. What’s more, you know it. Everyone knows it.

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.

I’ve read plenty about the conditions in Chinese factories, enough to make me want to never buy anything that says “Made in China” on the label. But, honestly, that’s getting nearly impossible these days. It’s not just about being too cheap to buy the more expensive version of the product made somewhere else with better labor laws; it’s that in many cases there is no other option that wasn’t also made in China.

Apple products present the biggest dilemma for me personally. I’ve been a Mac-o-phile for over 15 years. I’ve staked my livelihood around work that depends integrally on things Apple makes, and they’re all made in China. And Apple’s not alone — as far as I know, all of the major computer companies contract out their manufacturing to Chinese firms. I suppose I could build my own PCs and switch to Linux, but even then, it would be hard to find all of the necessary components that go into a computer, with a “nothing-made-in-China” restriction.

So, for me, in many cases, boycotting Chinese-made goods is simply impossible. But I do what I can. If there’s another option, I’ll take it. I’m willing to pay more if I have to. And even though I’m writing this on an Apple computer that was manufactured in one of these same Chinese factories, perhaps speaking out on the matter is some small penance for my complicity in what’s going on.

There’s more on the story from Gizmodo and, as usual, I learned about it all from Daring Fireball.

Ow, my brain!

Apollo 11 astronautI write code for a living. But we web developers have it easy. Server-side scripting languages like PHP may look alien at first, but they’re pretty easy to pick up and intuitive enough that you can really get going pretty fast, and once you’re familiar with the basic principles, it’s not hard to look at a block of code and figure out what it does.

But programming in the old days was a much finer and darker art. System resources were scarce, and everything had to be as efficient as possible — on the computer hardware, at least. A lot more of the “processing” had to happen inside the brains of the programmers before any of the code was even written. Looking at this kind of old code fries my brain.

The most notorious example of old-school assembler code I’ve encountered is the language used to program the Atari 2600. That’s something I’ve never been willing to touch, myself. And it’s for something trivial — video games. But here’s something that really freaks me out: the original source code from Apollo 11. This code is every bit as inscrutable — or more — and it was mission critical: the lives of three astronauts, over 200,000 miles from Earth depended on it working flawlessly.

Well, they made it back, so I guess it worked. But looking at the code, I have no idea how. Here’s an excerpt:

GUILDEN		EXTEND			# IS UN-AUTO-THROTTLE DISCRETE PRESENT?
# STERN					# RSB 2009: Not originally a comment.
  		READ CHAN30
		MASK	BIT5
  		CCS	A
  		TCF	STARTP67	# YES
P67NOW?		TC	CHECKMM		# NO:  ARE WE IN P67 NOW?
		DEC	67
		TCF	STABL?		# NO
STARTP66	TC	FASTCHNG	# YES
		TC	NEWMODEX
DEC66		DEC	66
		EXTEND
		DCA	HDOTDISP	# SET DESIRED ALTITUDE RATE = CURRENT
		DXCH	VDGVERT		# 	ALTITUDE RATE.
STRTP66A	TC	INTPRET
		SLOAD	PUSH
			PBIASZ
		SLOAD	PUSH
			PBIASY
		SLOAD	VDEF
			PBIASX
		VXSC	SET
			BIASFACT
			RODFLAG
		STOVL	VBIAS
			TEMX
		VCOMP
		STOVL	OLDPIPAX
			ZEROVECS
		STODL	DELVROD
			RODSCALE
		STODL	RODSCAL1
			PIPTIME
		STORE	LASTTPIP
		EXIT
		CAF	ZERO
		TS	FCOLD
		TS	FWEIGHT
		TS	FWEIGHT +1
VRTSTART	TS	WCHVERT

Source: Daring Fireball (of course).