I stopped by the mall the other day to pick up dinner at one of the restaurants that’s open to the outside. The mall interior, however, is closed again as California has re-shuttered indoor gathering spots to slow down the resurgent coronavirus.
New Kind of SCSI
I mean, I’m familiar with SCSI buses, but a SCSI truck is new to me. Do they have greater capacity?
(spotted on a walk yesterday)
Virtual Waiting Room
Waiting at home for a link to a video call is, in some ways, better than waiting at the doctor’s office. You’re home, after all! You can use your most comfortable chair. You don’t have to worry about getting sick from other people in the waiting room. You know where the bathroom is, you can bring your coffee in, you have all your own reading material.
But….
There’s always that nagging suspicion that the email with the conference link has been lost, and they’ve been waiting for you to connect for the last 10 minutes and will just move onto the next patient.
Which I’ve had happen.
Over the last few months we’ve dealt with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, several in-browser apps and at least one app that couldn’t figure out landscape orientation. Between school and health, we’ve had some setups where we log into an account and the system connects you to the right person, some where each meeting has its own code, and some where a week’s worth of classes will use the same code. Some send the code or URL by email, some by text message, some through a portal. A lot of them send it out right at appointment time.
None of them just, you know, call on the app when they’re ready.
I actually had to reschedule one appointment after checking in. The front office called me on the phone to do the check-in, and at the end they asked if I knew how to get onto their portal to get the Zoom link. I logged in, and waited…and waited…and waited… No new messages, and nothing in the appointment info about how to connect, only that it would be sent in a message. By the time I called back, they’d marked me as a no-show. It turned out they’d sent the link buried in a message (in their portal, of course), back when I’d made the appointment. “But it says you read this message!” Yeah…not recently.
I’ve got to wonder — if someone who does tech for a living has trouble keeping up with this stuff, how hard is it for people who aren’t used to it?
Pokemon in the Restaurant Business
I’ve been meaning to post this Kangaskhan at Gengis Khan Mongolian barbecue since… September? I forget exactly. Yeah, it’s a mall food court, so it’s definitely the Before Times. And it looks like the older Pokemon Go camera mode.
As for the Wynaut at ‘Y’ Not, that was a little more recent, on the way back from one of those rare outings to someplace farther away than the grocery store. But I had to stop for it.
Only a Test. (Whew!)
A couple of days ago I developed a cough and measured a fever. The cough has been very intermittent, and the fever went away after a couple of hours.
Still, I went for a Covid-19 test after measuring the fever, and we all went into lockdown mode just in case. No errands or walks. Just picking up the mail. Extra hand washing. Keeping physical distance at home. It could easily be a false alarm, but with cases surging, it seemed like a good idea to be certain.
All the drive-through centers in the area seem to be closed and I had to go to an urgent care. Instead of letting people in the waiting room, they were checking us in at the door, taking a phone number, and having us wait in our cars. An hour and a half later, they called me in. After checking vitals and symptoms, they actually had me swab my own nostrils with a q-tip and put it in a sample vial.
I got the results two days later through the network’s online portal: negative!
So with the cough and fever gone, and the coronavirus test negative, we can at least return to…well, whatever this is. It’s certainly not “normal.”
(This year has brought it home that “normal” doesn’t really exist – the world is in a constant state of flux, and what we consider “normal” are just local circumstances in time and space.)
But I can go back to daily walks (masked), drive-through and curbside pickup for errands (masked), and only having to keep my distance outside the house.
Pokemon at the Park
Sneasel is disappointed that the museum is closed.
Turtwig has found a new friend.
(I had such a hard time trying to get it to face the right direction, which is why it’s still a little bit off. At least I didn’t need to worry about the real turtle wandering away while I set up the shot.)
I don’t have a clever caption for this one, but thought it was cool that I caught the Croagunk right there while trying to decide what to do with the frog statue.
Incidentally, the frog statue is a Pokestop. And so is the historical cabin in the Sneasel picture.
I think Koffing is supposed to look like a magnified grain of dust or pollen…but it looks an awful lot like a coronavirus, too.
Individualism: Healthy vs Unhealthy Varieties
I’ve been thinking about individualism, and how there are healthy versions and unhealthy versions. For instance…
Healthy: If you can take care of something yourself, do it, so you don’t have to rely on someone else to do those things. Self-reliance is valuable, but it’s only one tool in the toolbox, and you recognize situations where cooperating with other people is the better option.
Proverbially, teaching a man to fish helps him develop self-reliance.
Example: I’ll make my own masks out of material I already have.
Unhealthy: Don’t ask for, accept, or offer help, because if you or the other person can’t do it on their own, they’re less worthy a person. Self-reliance is treated as an end in itself, and cooperation with others is inherently suspect.
And why would you teach a man to fish? He should know how to do that by now!
And definitely don’t trust someone who wants to teach you to fish. What the hell do they know?
Example: Why should I wear a mask to help someone else? Whether they get sick is their business, not mine. (Even if they get the virus from me. Which they won’t, because I’m not going to get sick, even though I’m not taking any precautions, because I know better.)
One of these attitudes can help us deal with a pandemic virus. The other will help the virus deal with us.