🗨 Status Report: What's Up With You?

Campfire
231

I will tell you all I know about the topic. No time for more hands-on help, sadly :expressionless:

As a Get Us PPE style initiative this makes sense. For the general public it would not make sense as there are just not enough of these masks around for everyone.

To my knowledge, healthcare workers prefer the FFP2 / FFP2 “filtering facepiece” single-use masks due to comfort in long shifts and because they don’t have to be disinfected. But if the situation gets much worse, they will need everything that can be made available. So yea, I think it makes sense.

1 Like
232

that’s already more than enough <3 we can take it from there.

233

USA now has the most active cases. National leadership would be a joke if it was SO not funny. I am doing ok so far, or so it seems.

234

there seems to be quite a lot of that going around.

https://twitter.com/badiucao/status/1243483531247931392

235

This is a New York Times column about the influence of the evangelical right wing on the current administration, which explains at least in part, why they are so spectacularly incompetent in dealing with this crisis.

" For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have lined up with the anti-government, anti-tax agenda not just as a matter of politics but also as a matter of theology. Ken Blackwell of the Family Research Council, one of the Christian right’s major activist groups, has gone so far as to cast food stamps and other forms of government assistance for essential services as contrary to the “biblical model.” Limited government, according to this line of thinking, is “godly government.”

When a strong centralized response is needed from the federal government, it doesn’t help to have an administration that has never believed in a federal government serving the public good. Ordinarily, the consequences of this kind of behavior don’t show up for some time. In the case of a pandemic, the consequences are too obvious to ignore."

236

Yesterday we tired out @HadeerGhareeb game “didiasks” in a video call. Was good fun and social exercise :). But the call was disconnected a few times, so we thought about making the game into a discord thread.

This is the first start :). @HadeerGhareeb will ask us as a community her carefully designed questions for opening up socially.

The first one is about the future of communication. Have a look at the link and give your answer :).

2 Likes
237

Just watched this beautiful video. A reminder that all shall pass.

DANCE DANCE from Thomas Blanchard on Vimeo.

2 Likes
239

trying to play hangman in a language I do not master, with a 7 year old who cannot yet spell. :roll_eyes:

1 Like
240

Sounds like fun. I tried once to play Bananagrams in Armenian, while speaking like at 5yo at best, and knowing a fraction of the alphabet. It was entertaining, especially for who got to check on my spelling and words.

1 Like
241

let’s just see what happens if this is put here :):

image

242

I spent this (rainy here in northern California) weekend alternating between reading, talking and listening about the now-rapid spread of the virus in the USA in a general state of horror, semi-escaping by doing numerous video chats with family spread out around the country, one of which was a dance party with 3 generations, and completely escaping by reading a novel. When it wasn’t raining I was often out in my big yard gathering up fallen tree branches from over the winter so I can burn them while it is still permitted. Looks like fire season and the virus might overlap this year in California. Almost too much to contemplate…

1 Like
243

Giving this a go, after a while away - nice to see some familiar faces here again!

I turned 38 this weekend, and after looking at different video tools, I figured out a way to hack zoom into using it like time-limited video inbox for video greetings, as an experiment in using video, and the scope for expression it offers over text:

https://blog.chrisadams.me.uk/2020/03/29/experiments-with-remote-birthday-greetings/

It worked out pretty well - I had designed this specifically to make it possible for a group of people to send a message at the same as a recorded video, but what came through were mainly individual video greeting, which were still nonetheless welcome. It sucks that the only service I could use for this was zoom, even after paying to try out a bunch of competitors - lets hope we see a more diverse ecosystem evolve over the coming months.

Also, given we’re all talking COVID-19, I shipped a related project I started working on last week, with a long standing client, Spendnetwork.

It uses the last ten years of collated open spending data to make it easier to for budget holders to find suppliers of critical products and services in the context of COVID-19:

https://openopps.com/covid-19

I’m hoping it’ll be useful, as in local government, when people leave their post in an organisation, lots of knowledge about supplier relationships leaves too, which slows an effective response.

The goal we’re going for is to mitigate against this, by piecing together information from lots of organisations that aren’t in competition from each other, and whose aggregate activity can reveal patterns in their own expenditure, resulting in better use of limited funds.

with some of this out of the way, I’m expecting to get back to some community building work on http://climateAction.tech and the Green Web Foundation, but that’s for another update.

Stay safe, fellow ryders :green_heart:

6 Likes
244

@owen @hugi check this out!

245

Hei, @mrchrisadams, happy birthday!! Very cool! So your meeting was set to last for a whole day, so that it records everything during that day?

Was just reading this on fb, people doing bday parties and even wakes :frowning:

Last night I went to a birthday on Zoom. Gloria Gaynor - I will survive with lyrics on shared screen and danced on Phoenix - lark. I also had cake in tune with the times, meaning in the shape of toilet paper roll that was written “Wiping away another year”. (Happy Birthday Andreea Mottram! :wine_glass: I wish you a lot of time

How do you guys bring the offline connection to online? Maybe you have happy hours on Zoom or Skype as you had weekly after work. Maybe you can meet your friends to eat together in front of the camera if you can’t go to the restaurant once a month. Maybe break the big family Sunday meal in small active windows. Maybe you can throw parties where everyone dances in their own room to a common music. Maybe continue an online support group. Look, an extraordinary example I found the online wake of the late professor -------, where people who knew him and shared events and stories about him in a dedicated Facebook group.

246

Nice idea @mrchrisadams :slight_smile: We’re working on our own video conferencing app, this could be a really cool feature to implement on it. I’ll DM you the link, as we’re keeping it for internal use at the moment.

1 Like
247

Had a panic attack while doing groceries. Under normal circumstances any less than one meter’s distance to unknown humans (and dogs) is trying. Avoid crowds like the plague (dont go to e.g concerts for this reason). With this thing going on, people getting within 3 meters kicks off anxiety attacks. This is going to be me any day soon…

04

1 Like
248

My stay-at-home project - converting an old falling-down chicken coop into a sturdy shed. Built those doors yesterday. All old-growth redwood salvaged from other projects. There is a book called “Good to Great” that posits it is easier to go from being good at something to great than it is going from mediocre to good. In carpentry, I am trying to prove that theory wrong. The key word is “trying.”

Shed%20Doors

2 Likes
249

My partners company is trying hard to make their employees comfortable in home office, sending the ergonomic office chairs, screens, a care package with a teddybear. And for this Friday they send every employee a lunch. But they might not have thought that through. They are sending lunch for one person to each employee. I guess that in a family with two kids or so they might be a bit disappointed that mum or dad is getting delivery, but they not ;). But nevertheless, they are trying which is a nice effort.

5 Likes
250

that’s really lovely.

251

When watching any film or series where they share food in public or shake hands like normal people I now have an immediate reaction of:" NOOO! you should not do that!". Noticed something similar with old movies when they need to communicate something and can’t reach each other immediately thinking: “JUST call or send a message.” or “JUST google it”. Before remembering that in that era their were no smartphones. Brain immediately interprets “images” from the past under a current lens.

Did you experience similar?

1 Like