I’ve seen a lot of the back half of couriers this week, as they scurry away down the stairs. Presumably because they get evaluated on delivery frequency, rather than because they’re worried of spreading disease between them (who have heightened hygiene procedures) and me (although they probably don’t know that I have a ridiculous amount of soap because last year I kept on adding it to Ocado orders forgetting I already had some).
Flapjacks all eaten. My sugar balance has recovered.
Work meetings update: our all-teams chats are still going strong, although a fair number of people were off on Friday. Fran, our EA and office manager, ran a quiz on our Friday live stream, which presented interesting challenges. If you’re interested, you should read Anna Shipman’s write up of how she did a team quiz, and then add in our experience trying to do it on video:
Not everyone could hear the questions. Since the first correct answer won, this didn’t work well so Fran quite rapidly started putting questions in the text chat instead.
Fran couldn’t always hear the answers, so I’m not convinced that the final result was fair.
Except I won, so clearly it was.
Colleague who was self-isolating has recovered.
This weeknote is a day late because last night I was going over Google Summer of Code submissions. This year is going to be an interesting one because several of our applicants have noted that their exams are moving from their planned dates to…some other time yet to be determined. I can only imagine the stress that’s causing, for students and their teachers alike.
It seems simultaneously that nothing has happened in a week, and that it’s been a million years. It might be easy to feel down about this, that during lockdown we should be able to create and achieve all the things we were distracted from before. R.B. Lemberg noted this week in a Patreon post titled “Creativity during difficult times” that it doesn’t work like that, at least not for everyone. We all need to give ourselves permission to do whatever we need to be okay. For some people that will be creating something amazing. For others it will be feeding themselves, getting dressed, and sleeping for about the right amount.
Stay safe.