Covid-19 weeknotes 10

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Friday 29th May, 2020

1. From virtual impro and virtual dinners to a virtual Eurovision. One of my friends compèred, and a lot of others had recorded postcards which in many cases were better than some of the weird things the countries actually put together in normal years.

2. And this weekend, a virtual picnic!

3. I decided it would be nice to be on my balcony during the virtual picnic, so I have (somewhat) cleaned it, and ordered new balcony furniture which is currently dotted around the flat waiting for me to get it out.

4. I’m hoping that instead of something to take up my time I can now just sit on my balcony and do nothing. However since that has literally never happened before for more than about five minutes before I got bored, I need a backup plan.

5. In sorting through boxes lying around from moves and reshuffles past I discovered some shadow puppets, and even some things I think I can use to make a screen. I’ve also found a couple of partly-made masks that I started about twelve years ago with a friend who has since married and had a child. So I might do something with one or more of those.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 weeknotes 9

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Friday 22nd May, 2020

1. Thanks to Andrew Ormerod for pointing out The Encounter, online and raising money to help the Kuikuro indigenous community in Brazil through Covid-19. A treat, but quickly because it’s only up until Monday.

2. Other than that mostly still too busy to do much outside work.

3. Although I did try to find a recipe involving auberine, since I had an aubergine. Seriously one of the biggest failures I have ever attempted. Still not sure if the couple of substitutions were the problem or if aubergines are, as I suspected, just a really bad idea for a fruit.

4. I bought beer. Not quite the experience I’ve been looking forward to post-lockdown since (checks notes) week 6, which was a month ago. But it feels more appropriate to the warm weather than knocking back red wine.

5. Next Friday, James Lark’s new musical, Infants, is having an online preview, seeing as any other kind of theatre is basically impossible under lockdown. There’s a Facebook event if that’s your thing, which says it’ll be on Tring Productions’ website which suggests it’ll be on their YouTube channel, and I assume by next week there’ll be a TikTok link too.

6. Or any other art or performance, really. It’s a long weekend in the UK and the US. Enjoy it if you can.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 weeknotes 8

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Friday 15th May, 2020

1. Last week I wasn’t working, and largely avoided using a computer where I could, hence no update.

2. I did watch all of the MCU films from scratch, in a slightly random order. I now have Unfashionable Opinions, and vaguely toyed with writing a post about how I don’t like most of the ones other people like, and trying to figure out why most of the characters act opposite their nature in Captain America: World Police, and when exactly the spirit of the early films dies (I think it’s partway through Captain America: The Winter Soldier), and when the new spirit appears (it might be after the opening of Black Panther, but I suspect it’s in the middle of Doctor Strange’s training). But that felt like effort, self-indulgent, and not very interesting.

3. This week started quietly at work then ramped up as I started working on the current big pitch.

4. Therefore, I’ve been too busy to be bored.

5. Although sufficiently tired to favour mindless tasks over trying to read or do much in the evening. So I’ve finished restacking all my books, which I started while bored back in week 7. Slightly more accurate calculation now says I need far fewer extra shelves than I thought. Fairly soon I’ll get bored enough again that I’ll buy some new bookcases, which will then give me endless tiny tasks of moving books so they’re in sensible places.

6. They still make furniture, right?

7. This is the end of week 9, so the weeknotes numbers don’t line up any more. But I’ll say that again a different way: I’ve been working from home, and (except for the first few days) isolated now for over two months. Boris Johnson keeps seeing his shadow. Someone should steal it.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 weeknotes 7

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Friday 1st May, 2020

1. A much quieter week, which is possibly the wrong way round as I’m now on holiday for a week. So trading a week where I mostly talked to people at work for a week where I won’t talk to people at work at all is only really going to work if I remember to talk to other people instead. Whereas if I’d talked to other people this week as well then I’d be all set for a week on my own ignoring the world completely.

2. The world deserves to be ignored, and not just the Matt Hancock bit who is still obsessed with mobile apps. Also, his quoted line “to reassert, as much as is safely possible, the liberty of us all” will do wonders for reminding politicians why they employ speechwriters.

3. Bored, I started to reverse my trend from a while ago of stacking books horizontally. I honestly don’t care about what it does to the spines (except for a very few volumes), but it’s just damn inconvenient to get them out when you want one.

4. I’ve done a back of the envelope calculation that I need another eleven shelves to take up the extra books that were previously better filling the available vertical space.

5. Fortunately I have space for more bookcases after clearing out a load of old boxes and storage bits and pieces back in week 4.

6. Made an approximation to carbonara today, amazingly for the first time. I now have a much better idea of how to do it next time, and yet another reminder of one problem with recipe books, specifically the one about onions.

7. If you generate URLs in your site that contain personal data (say an email address in an auto-login or confirmation link – although please don’t do that) then at least set Referrer-Policy to no higher than origin-when-cross-origin (you can also do it via meta). The default will leak personal data to the servers containing third party resources you load, such as Javascript libraries, even if they do nothing with it. Worse, security researchers will accuse you of sending data to Google, and no one wants that.

   1. This doesn’t seem to prevent cross-origin loaded Javascript from reading document.referrer, although it really should do.

   2. Chrome 84 will change the default, due July 2020. Firefox you can change the default policy in config.

   3. Or use Content-Security-Policy to prevent anything cross-domain from loading in the first place.

8. It’s May. Just in case you’d lost track.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 weeknotes 6

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Friday 24th April, 2020

1. Impro over Zoom went well, aided by the three of us having improvised together now for the best part of two decades. We recorded it, so I need to listen back and see if there’s anything worth putting out there as a lockdown episode of Totally Made Up Tales.

2. My first Zoom dinner party, or rather steak without the restaurant and, for one person, without the steak. Also went well, although not quite as fun and fluid as it would have been face to face, partly because it was six people but only four screens. And the group of three kept on passing the wine amongst themselves, which broke the illusion.

3. I’ve started making a list of things I want to do at the end of lockdown. Little things, to celebrate. Top at the moment is ordering a pint of lager and drinking it, ideally outdoors in the sunshine.

4. Tired of finding things to do with cauliflower, which seems to be about 30% of my vegetable boxes by volume. I made some soup, which is okay, and I’ve found uses for another giant head of the stuff. But it’s just not a good enough vegetable for the effort. Please weather, send me a new vegetable season.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 weeknotes 5

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Friday 17th April, 2020

1. Much quieter week, evenings mostly spent watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. This is only partly because I’ve basically run out of boxes to go through. Also just needed a bit of a break from doing things.

2. This has delayed having to find a project by several days, kind of in the hope that the weather would get better and I could maybe do an outdoor project like cleaning my balcony. Instead, it’s raining.

3. Although I did wash all my bedding. Like pillows and duvet and shit like that which takes ages because it’s full of sheep, or some other things that never dry.

4. Haven’t talked with anyone on video except for work this week, and frankly I’m okay with that. Still plenty of conversation by other means. Hoping to experiment with socially distant internet-based impro this weekend. And next week, socially distant steak night.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 weeknotes 4

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Friday 10th April, 2020

1. When I moved into my flat about 13 years ago, there was some stuff that moved with me in boxes that I never quite got round to. At the start of this year I laid out a plan to work through all the fiddly small piles, the drawers where I might have dumped things five or ten years ago, and yes those boxes. As of today I’m down to one box that needs working through, plus varying amounts of nostalgia and technology that is either going to be recycled, thrown out, or put away tidily in storage.

2. I’ve heard that enough people are doing this that it’s causing problems for bin collection. Most of the stuff I’m getting rid of is either electronic waste which I’ll have to hang onto until I can get it somewhere sensible, or paper which I can drip feed into my kerbside recycling.

3. The downside of basically finishing sorting out my home is that I now need another project. And I can’t renovate my bathroom or buy significant furniture, which limits things somewhat.

4. The upside is finding notes from university, including some "let this man out of the all-girl dorms, he’s not dangerous" slips. One reads “I found this man in my fridge. Please let him out as I have no room for my milk!”.

5. I continue to cook more than I usually would, including some weird banana, pear and oats recipe that I found online and which was delicious but a terrible recipe. It managed to mix (American) cups with other measures sufficiently that even following it with a decent dry measure made it impossible to figure out how much to use. It also I think relied on but didn’t state a step of mixing things up at a critical point, meaning that eating it required a spoon rather than a fork or (as I suspect is possible if you put in enough oats) fingers.

6. I note that we’re encouraging children to damage cooking equipment as a way of celebrating our essential workers now.

7. I’m no longer able to remember the last time I’ve spoken to people (whether on social media, by phone, or by video). I may have to start some sort of diary to keep track.

Stay safe.

Covid-19 weeknotes 3

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Saturday 4th April, 2020

1. 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).

2. Flapjacks all eaten. My sugar balance has recovered.

3. 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:

   1. 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.

   2. Fran couldn’t always hear the answers, so I’m not convinced that the final result was fair.

   3. Except I won, so clearly it was.

4. Colleague who was self-isolating has recovered.

5. 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.

6. 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.

Covid-19 weeknotes 2

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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.

Covid-19 weeknotes 1

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Friday 20th March, 2020

I was away in Cypress when the UK finally started responding to SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 in anything like a serious fashion, but after I got home it was another week until today’s butt-load of serious measures, including closing social venues combined with various economic measures to help people and businesses survive. By this point we – the whole of Omnicom globally – had been working from home for a week.

So this seemed a good time to start some sort of virus weeknotes.

1. At work we’ve been experimenting with open video channels. At least, I say we; I mostly mean that I’ve been keeping a Teams video chat open and other people have occasionally slid into it. Most of my colleagues have lots of other meetings, but some have tried to pop in between them. Self-reporting, these little bits of more social contact have helped. Today we replaced our usual in-office drinks with a video chat happy hour, with people sharing some things they’d been doing outside work, and their drink of choice. A number of people picked a drink that wasn’t from one of our clients, which given we just won the account of a boatload of drinks is pretty shameful.

2. With friends and family, I’ve been on WhatsApp a lot more than usual, sharing coping strategies and probably being more in touch than I usually am.

3. At home, I’ve been cooking more (easier to be bothered when I don’t have a commute), and finally putting up pictures I had framed last year but never quite got round to hanging. Here for instance above my desk is a Chris Riddell line drawing that my sister gave me (and on the right a map that she also gave me, but which has been there for a while):

   

4. The country is full of crazy and/or stupid people. Just merrily going to the gym, or the pub. Lots of them shaking hands. You can blame this partly on Boris Johnson’s attempts to keep people calm by delaying the introduction of serious measures to contain the spread of the virus, but at least some of those people should be showing more personal responsibility.

I’ve left the house every day or two this week, and the latest government guidance doesn’t say I shouldn’t, but I’ll continue to avoid other people (in case any of them turns out to be nasty, brutish, and short – solitary not really being a problem right now, and poor making no difference).

Stay safe.