I’m going a little crazy. It’s not from my family but more a lack of everything else. I miss my friends, my casual acquaintances, drop-off at my kids schools, the restaurants, the movies, the casual interactions, the hiking, the driving, the traveling. All of it. It was fun. I can’t wait wait for this madness to be over.
Just wrote a scathing Yelp review of my living room
As we’re all still at home, not everyone can get out and celebrate in the typical way. I thought I’d post how it’s going with others around out there:
A chocolate factory in France:
The Pope is breaking with tradition and going online, so hopefully all of you will too
LOOK: Pope Francis leads the Easter Sunday vigil Mass at the St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican with no public participation due to the outbreak of #COVID19. Remo Casilli, Reuters #SemanaSanta2020pic.twitter.com/ayh4PC2Oak
Meanwhile, i’ve been thinking WAY too much about Trolls 2: World Tour. Some thoughts:
Country Music Land could have been way cooler. Have one area that’s sad and drunk, another that’s party (Devil Goes Down to Georgia), another that’s all chicks (Dixie, Taylor Swift, Dolly Part), one that’s just Garth, and another that’s all ‘Merica with beers and trucks. That’s an awesome land and a place I could hang for a long time.
Other Stuff
BREAKING NEWS: I have been feeling unwell the last two days – tired, headache, foggy brain. I have been concerned about COVID infection, but it was hard to imagine how: we have been so careful.
I just discovered 5 minutes ago that I HAVE BEEN MAKING DECAF COFFEE FOR 2 DAYS.
Zoom is the accidental social network of the coronavirus pandemic
What I’m Thinking About: Zoom
This has been an incredible rise and a little bit of a fall for Zoom.
In the past month, they went from 10 million daily users to 200 million. Wowza. In the past week 90,000 schools across 20 countries have used it to conduct remote classes. Ninety thousand schools.
They also revealed that while they’ve been focused on keeping up with growth, they’ve done some not great things. Specifically, they were sending info to Facebook even if you didn’t log in or ever use Facebook. Second, the videos/calls aren’t really encrypted, which means others can see and hear what went on. Oh, and third, many of the videos and encryption keys were routed through China so they were available for the Chinese state to hear and view. Hmm. 🤔
Personally, I don’t care if my personal or work calls are viewed in China but I suspect a lot of more important people and companies do. This could be real bad for them and for Zoom. I’m curious to see what the fallout is.
I’m also curious to see how Zoom integrates itself more into my life. I’ve been doing double-dates with friends, group family chats, happy hours, school lessons and more. It’s a daily app now.
Finally, I usually really dislike recorded Zoom calls, but here’s one I couldn’t stop watching. It’s ESPN reporters inviting famous people to join them.
Katie Nolan challenged her ESPN friends to invite the most famous person they know to a Zoom call, and the results are spectacular.
This should be a weekly show but with even more famous people involved. I wanna see Denzel randomly pop into a Zoompic.twitter.com/vV4kGzgPDd
Nationally, the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. is projected to hit its peak within the next few days. Personally, I’ve been hoping that this is the worst as we had a few days of no growth, but yesterday we had peaks in new cases and deaths in the US and many others charts are saying that we still have some more time to go. 😞
NEW: Fri 10 April update of coronavirus trajectories
Daily new deaths:
• US & UK still on clear trend of rising daily deaths. Reporting patterns may give occasional dips, but clearly trending up 📈
• India daily death toll accelerating ⚠️
This is what you get if you cross @Simone_Biles and Indiana Jones. This is almost as impressive as that mane he has on his head. I wish we could see the first 1000 times he tried it though… pic.twitter.com/r6exf2vfbj
“An open wound and an opening hope for new things” the Italian tricolour ✊🏼 newest Vanity Fair Italia
Murals
Murals are popping up all over the world to honor tireless health care workers, bring hope to those passing by, and to just vent. I loved seeing these. It was cool seeing how everywhere around the world we’re all dealing with the same thing, and it reminded me that this is the first time ever that the entire world has been focused on one thing.
In New Orleans, a graffiti artist called “Bandit” has painted murals in the city — one of nurses and one of children playing with toilet paper rolls.
This is happening all over the world. Literally every city is out painting their city to remind us that we’re all in this together, that this sucks, and to be safe.
In Berlin…
In Scotland,
In Milan,
In Sydney,
In the UK,
In Los Angeles,
In Moscow,
In Warsaw, Poland,
In Pontefract, U.K.
In Indonesia,
In Glasgow, Scotland
This is indeed a unique time in history
This is just so surreal. All important safety measures of course….but still so surreal pic.twitter.com/BlHCa04mOX
This synchronicity of the decline in restaurant bookings around the world—or, at least, among OECD nations with OpenTable—is remarkable.
Different distancing policies. Different outbreak rates. Different cultures. Different laws. And they all fell to zero in 15 days. pic.twitter.com/zPyIWAGv1y
I’ve been working from home for the past year. One thing I noticed recently is that lots of other companies aren’t doing it very well. Over the past years, I’ve learned some modern work-from-home concepts. Specifically, there are 5 levels of remote work. The levels are:
Thinking this is temporary, and waiting to get back to the office to do your work.
Trying to recreate the office environment. This means trying to do things in-person, keeping all the interactions real-time, and making sure people are present and available during work hours. I saw a lot of companies here when coronavirus started. People were still expected to be online from 9 to 5, and in some cases employers installing screen-logging software on their employee machines so that they can play the role of Big Brother.
Acceptance and adaptation. Here, companies and employees invest in their home office with better videos and possibly noise cancellation machines. Meetings move to shared docs and people start working asynchronously.
Fully asynchronous. Getting to a place where you can actually get more done because you’re at home. This is where you want to be.
Companies that truly practice asynchronous communication have stepped out of the industrial revolution, and no longer conflate presence with productivity, or hours with output, as one might on the factory floor.
Nirvana. This is where your distributed team works better than any in-person team ever could.
But because they mastered the baton handoff, they shaved seconds off their race and came in 2nd. That’s right, the Japanese got the silver medal because they were better and the handoff.
The idea here is that, as a company, you can master how work and ideas are handed off between employees your company can be much faster, more efficient, and a better place to work than others.
True asynchronous working is the place you need to get to. We’re working on it at Onward and so far it’s been great. Using the tool Notion is a big piece of it. I love Notion and the fact that it’s worth $2 Billion with only 40 employees should indicate this is a popular trend. I could talk about this for hours, but here’s a good place to start: a good post that goes into this.
Other Items
At my house it’s Spring Break which means there are no lesson plans coming from school. Instead, our current project is for Hunter and Sasha to make 7 really nice cards to send to their grandparents and cousins.
Speaking of Sports (from yesterday’s email), the Rakuten Monkeys of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (which is Taiwan) will play games in front of 500 robot mannequins dressed up as fans.
Also, the second episode of Some Good News by John Krasinski landed yesterday. Pretty funny and good:
Stats
The virus is starting to get out more and more in the US. I thought it was interesting to see that only 1 or 2 out of 10 know someone who has it. I know a few people.
White is first of all respect.
White is rebirth, the light after darkness, the sum of all colours.
White is the colour of the uniforms worn by those who put their own lives on the line to save ours.
It represents space and time to think, as well as to stay silent.
White is for those who are filling this empty time and space with ideas, thoughts, stories, lines of verse, music and care for others.
White recalls when, after the crisis of 1929, this immaculate colour was adopted for clothes as an expression of purity in the present, and of hope in the future.
What I’m thinking about: Companies Getting Creative
I was talking with my friend Camilla yesterday and she had a great point:
Its pretty phenomenal how companies are adapting and adjusting and getting flat out creative… pie shops and bakeries hosting virtual baking clubs, wine shops and florists doing classes, tastings and deliveries, I saw Redfin is now doing virtual showings where an agent goes and essentially FaceTimes and answers chat questions.
I totally agree. One area I’m really impressed with is Masks. Now that we’re past the whole should I wear? debate, we can focus on what really matters – how they look. I’m starting to see some flair. You can get all different colors and styles now:
Meanwhile I’m like the rest of the world in just rewatching old games, trying to decide if eSports are a thing (not yet), and looking at videos on Twitter to pass the time until sports can start up again.
I especially like today’s cover. The “Lifeline” cover seems like a nod to the essential worker, and to their place and contribution in a ravaged metropolis.
What I’m Thinking About: Changes in Ridesharing
At Onward, we’re diving into the food delivery world. We provide custom service where you can ask our drivers to shop in any store, go to multiple stores and do it all through the phone. This is new for us. We’re not the only one making changes in the ride-sharing world. Some changes that have stuck out for me:
Ride-hailing in China: all riders are required to wear facemasks, there’s an apps that tells you if your driver has had a temperature check today, and an in-car sign that shows if the vehicle was disinfected or not.
Good morning, friends in Asia! — What are your ride-sharing companies doing to safely transport people and add revenue as your governments incrementally lighten restrictions? I read about the plastic screens, but what other innovations are you seeing for safety and revenue?
There’s a company called Wheels that is deploying eBikes with self-cleaning handlebars and brake levers. “NanoSeptic’s handlebar technology, which is powered by light, uses mineral nano-crystals to create an oxidation reaction that is stronger than bleach“
Stay-at-home orders have reduced traffic accidents by half in Los Angeles. This is 15,000 fewer collisions per month and 6,000 fewer injury accidents per month. Man, you don’t realize how reckless our regular life is.
The Animal Game
Almost every night we play a game where a kid thinks of an animal and the other people have to ask questions and guess what they are. It usually involves the person acting out what that animal is.
Other Stuff
Matt McConaughey jumped on to a Zoom call to be the bingo reader for an assisted living facility.
ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT: Watch Matthew McConaughey host a virtual bingo game for residents at a senior living home in Texas pic.twitter.com/DINQ3peDHG
Government Loans. Today is the day that the government is accepting applications for small business loans. My business and millions of others are swarming to this. The current amount Uncle Sam is looking to loan out is 2.5 months of payroll. We’ll see how that goes.
Schools Staying Closed. As I mentioned last week, I’m not impressed with the current home schooling system that Mill Valley has. But, I can’t see us going back to school in the fall. Even if the curve flattens, there will be no vaccine, so I can’t imagine big groups being allowed. Nobody wants to the school that starts the next outbreak. That means we might be doing this home-schooling thing for a LOT longer than I had thought. Good thing Sasha and Diane put together two new desks for Hunter and S this weekend.
What else
Our Pets Too?! It was reported yesterday that cats can get COVID. Apparently a tiger in the NY Zoo tested positive. I never considered that my two cats could be my weakest link in my attempt to separate myself from the outside world. One of them is super skittish so she’s no issue, but the other, Lucious, is too damn friendly. As if we needed another thing to worry about.
Also, come on people, are you still not staying inside?
I’m switching up my case tracking. I’ve got a spreadsheet with the daily amounts and am going to just post the graph new cases/deaths. That seems to be the most interesting to me as I want to see when the World and US start plateauing and then going down. Let me know if you’d like to see something different:
Yesterday was a rainy Saturday over here at the Lewhouses, so there were lots of in-home activities. Diane and Sasha built some desks to improve our home schooling setup.
While that was happening, Hunter and I watched the Han Solo movie. After completing his Millennium Falcon Lego set, he was curious about how Han got the ship and its origin story. That movie got a bad rap when it came out but it’s not terrible. Lord/Miller did get screwed though.
Later in the afternoon, I then HAD to get out of the house so I loaded up the kiddos and we went for a hike here in Mill Valley to a local waterfall:
Finally, we finished the Netflix docuseries, Tiger King. A good watch:
There’s a good Op-Ed by Bill Gates in the Washington Post. He brings up a good point – the federal government could start NOW preparing for a vaccine and invest in the favorites to mass produce the ultimate vaccine that gets created. This whole madness doesn’t really stop until we get the vaccine, so why don’t we do all we can to get prepared for that. During this whole period Bill Gates has shown to be a total winner and a national treasure. History will look extremely favorably on him.
Bill Gates to build factories to manufacture the 7 most promising vaccines, so they can all be tested in parallel.
“A few billion in this situation, where there’s trillions of dollars being lost economically, it is worth it… we can save months, because every month counts.” pic.twitter.com/ZqhGRGMRAt
Also, the mask business is ridiculous. First we weren’t supposed to wear them, now we should wear anything we can come up with.
I read this great interview with the woman who blew the whole lid off the story and the ridiculousness of the CDC not recommending wearing masks. There’s a lot of good nuggets in here including (a) why no-one in the medical community could write the story and contradict the CDC, (b) why Japan is the perfect place to prove that mass work,
In fact, there’s a very interesting case, in Japan where they’re doing everything wrong but masks — they’re not testing properly, they’re not socially isolating, they’re still talking about should we shut down this or that, they tried for a long time probably to try to keep the Olympics, which is hopeless, it wasn’t going to happen — they do as a culture wear masks about 60 to 80% of the time depending on the estimates. And while I think because they’re not testing, they have a bit of an undercount, they have more cases than they know, but they’re not Lombardy, they’re not Italy.
In other news, Louis CK is releasing anew comedy special…
Louis CK releasing a special when no one can leave the room feels pretty on brand TBH
Home-schooling. Our online learning is sort of a joke. The teachers are just barely sending over what’s needed. We’re trying our best, but it’s hard. I can only imagine it will only get better as the teachers and staff figure it out.
Speaking of, this is a GREAT read about how higher ed (mostly colleges) will adapt post-COVID and how they and tech will merge. It will be fascinating to watch over the next 5 years.
Getting Out. Sasha and I are very similar. We both love to get out of the house and be active. If we don’t leave the house and do a walk or run, we’re crabby during the day and don’t sleep as well at night. We’re starting to combat this problem by taking long walks around 5-6pm, before dinner. Yesterday we took a nice 50 minute bike ride down the road. We’re both a bit nicer when we return.
Finally, NYC. The situation there seems exceptionally dire. There was an Amber Alert-like message sent to everyone in NYC asking if they know of any licensed healthcare workers.
A big thank you for the bday wishes – this year it’s all about fighting #COVID19 and healthcare workers are on the front lines.
The field hospital in New York’s Central Park is already at half capacity on its third day treating Covid-19 patients, according to the director of the facility https://t.co/iznk8Jb0G9
