: Covid-19 weeknotes 2

Published at
Friday 27th March, 2020

  1. Lockdown is now the rule in the UK, although it’s not terribly clear what that means. It’s been more than a week since I was closer than two metres from another human. And honestly even then it was a courier. Right now this doesn’t feel too weird. I’ve read stories of people in China developing agoraphobia as a result of the lockdown, and I can imagine there’s some anthropophobia thrown in as well.

  2. I made flapjacks. It now feels like I am mostly eating flapjacks. I don’t recommend this; it feels like I’m made of sugar, and I have to drink a lot more fluids to avoid crystalising.

  3. Work meetings update: I gave up on a Teams video chat, because I’ve had far too many meetings this week to bother to find it and open it again after every one. The all-team chats continue, and seem to be bringing people together.

  4. One close colleague with symptoms, self-isolating. Hope and trust she’ll be okay. One prime minister, too.

  5. Google Summer of Code is in full swing, although with slightly extended timelines. So it’s that time of year when students turn up and don’t understand git, and I swear at most of the online guides and suggestions for telling people to do things like git add -a (or even git commit -a). Oh, and can the universe stop advising people to git merge without at least having a look at git show-branch HEAD HEAD@{u} first? To say nothing of git’s recommendation that after git fetch -p you should run git pull to merge, which is just an imprecation to use bandwidth, and hence electricity, needlessly. (Admittedly it gives it on git status, and it can’t tell how up-to-date its remote tracking branch is.)

  6. It’s my birthday soon. What I’d like is:

    • warm weather
    • everyone who runs a website whose GDPR consent mechanism doesn’t have a clear “deny all except essential” button to fix that before the two year anniversary, because come on
    • people to think first about others, and second about themselves, when coming into conflict (which will be increasingly)
    • everyone on video chats to use a damned headset, seriously. Having to hope you turn torwards your computer because you don’t have a proper microphone was annoying on day 1.

I’ve left the house briefly every couple of days. Every day if you count going onto my balcony.

Stay safe.