Posted on

Online Training For Covid-19

We are in trouble. Folks are dying. Washington State, thankfully, has a bit better control of COVID-19 than most states, but the death toll is bad. As I write this, 870 are dead in Washington State, nearly 75,000 nationally. In the U.S., unemployment is the highest its been since the Great Depression in my grandparents’ day.

On top of the pandemic, Intalco appears to be closing

I remember when Intalco was built. Neighbors who struggled on twenty-acre dairy farms shipping a few cans of Grade B milk, took a leap and got good jobs when Intalco opened. But I’m afraid that’s over. They used to say Intalco came for the cheap hydroelectricity, but Amazon, Microsoft, and Google data centers are the high profit hydro users now.

Businesses that were sound in January are up on the jacks today. Whole industries, like restaurants, airlines, and retail department stores, are severely curtailed and on the verge of failure. Even if a treatment or vaccine for the novel coronavirus appears tomorrow, a share of these enterprises will never return.

On the other hand, many online businesses, from Amazon on down, are thriving. I’ve seen numbers from the grocery and big box stores that look good. I notice that yards here in Ferndale look better tended today than they did this time last year.

Not everything is bleak

There are opportunities out there. Not the same ones as last year or the year before, but the breaks are waiting, and some people will find them and come out of this meat grinder better off than they were before they ever heard of a coronavirus. Like those struggling Grade B dairymen.

I know something you can do today

Level up. Improve your skills. Whatcom County Public Library System offers some very high-quality help. With a WCLS library card you can access Lynda.com courses.

These are the real thing. Premium LinkedIn subscribers pay close to thirty dollars a month for access to these courses and businesses pay even more to make them available to their employees. The library offers them to you for free. I was glad to pay for several of these courses myself before I realized I could get them on my library card. All you have to do is go to WCLS.org, click on the Digital Resources tab, then click on Lynda.com. Enter your library card number and pin, then choose which course to take first.

Some of the courses are just fun: Ukulele, for example. But some are very serious.

Construction trades

I happen to be an over-educated and snobbish intellectual, but it annoys me that American culture is obsessed with college degrees. At one point in my rambling life, I became a carpenter, going through a four-year formal apprenticeship with both on-the-job and classroom training. Having experienced both higher and trade education, I know that a trade is nothing to sniff at. I learned at least as much in my apprenticeship as I did in four years of college. I display my journeyman’s certificate right beside my college diplomas.

If a construction trade in the post-COVID-19 building boom sounds interesting, Lynda.com has a course for you: Skilled Trades: Construction Apprenticeship Foundations. It offers up-to-date and realistic lessons on choosing a trade and finding an apprenticeship.

Online business

Do you have, or work in, a business that is struggling under lockdowns? Consider putting the business online.

The opportunities for local online businesses have never been better. The pandemic has forced people to shop more online, but you don’t have to hand your local customers to the biggies.

Here’s a software industry insider tip: Google recently changed its shopping search algorithm to favor local online businesses over Amazon and Walmart. And I’ll bet your customer neighbors want to buy from you.

Setting up a Shopify online storefront is not hard or expensive. The no frills route is almost entirely financed by a 2% cut taken on each sale with little upfront investment. Lynda.com has a course for you: Learning Shopify. You could get your online business running in less than a week.

Want to learn how to set up and hold a Zoom meeting? Check out Learning Zoom.

Thinking about jumping to the front of the curve? UC-Berkeley instructor, Dr. Jonathan Reichental’s course, Introduction to Quantum Computing, will put you waaaay out there.

Yes. May 2020 is bleak. But the library is ready to help you make it better.

Posted on

Living with Screens During Lockdown

In the covid-19 pandemic, everyone has entered my world of working from home, online meetings, and spending most of both night and day in in front of a screen. In my career as a software architect, I worked regularly with online teams spread over every continent but Antarctica. The last decade of my career, I worked from our old farmhouse on Waschke Road most of the time. Since I’ve retired, I spend as much time writing in my home office as I did when I was gainfully employed.

I have some advice on how to be comfortable and even enjoy the online screen life. Mind you I am not a physician, ophthalmologist, or physical therapist, only an opinionated coder, but you might find some of my suggestions useful.

First, let me say that everyone is different. The saying is that “your mileage may vary” and I have found that my mileage usually varies widely. For me, when it comes to wellbeing, it works better to experiment than to find an expert’s rule and stick with it. So, this is my first suggestion: try different strategies; pay close attention to how you feel, both physically and mentally. Go with whatever makes you feel the best, but try reasonable strategies as they occur to you. Also be aware that change is constant. What worked well yesterday may not be optimal today. A tiny pain can turn into a screaming wildcat in a short time.

The most important consideration for me is my eyes. I think there is a good reason for this. We live in a three-dimensional world and our eyes are designed (or evolved, if you will) to move constantly, continually refocusing on objects at different distances, and adjusting to different colors and intensities of light. Screens are flat and most of the time they are at a fixed distance from our eyes. The intensity and color of the screen stays the roughly the same. Our bodies are simply not made for this fixed environment. We have to compensate.

I have found that if I take care of my eyes when I am online, the rest of my body tends to take care of itself. That doesn’t mean that I intentionally ignore the recommendations of the ergonomic experts, but I find that when I take care of my eyes properly, the rest of the ergonomic rules fall in place and I can quickly adapt to changing circumstances, like a new piece of furniture or moving to a different room without looking at charts and getting out a tape measure.

Now for some bullet points:

  • Frequently look away from the screen and into the distance. It helps to be near a window with some action outside. There are apps available that remind you to look away every few minutes, but I personally can’t abide those bonking timers. The antics of the crows, seagulls, and assorted avians outside my window works much better for me. I also like a room with some visual interest—like shelves of familiar books and other memorabilia (clutter).
  • I avoid using a laptop for any length of time. Put your laptop on a stand (or a stack of books) and get an external keyboard.
  • Position your screen so that you are looking at the upper third of the display with your neck in an unstrained position and at a proper distance. That’s about two feet for most people. I have three pairs of glasses. One pair for screen distance, one pair for reading, which is closer for me than screen distance, and a pair of lineless bifocals. For me, the bifocals are a disaster for serious reading or screen work. The area of lens that is the right focus is too small and forces me into contortions. But they are great for normal life.
  • Invest in the highest resolution monitor you can afford. I find hi-res much more important than size. I like using a twenty-two-inch display and I’ve thought about getting an even larger one, but forced to choose between resolution and size, I feel better after a long day with a hi-res screen.
  • Position lighting carefully. I find having my desk perpendicular to a north facing window with the window on the left to be perfect. If I were left-handed, I’d want it to the right, so my dominant hand does not cast shadows when I am writing by hand. I seldom print anything, but I like to draft and plan on paper. Facing a window is not bad, but it places the screen in a shadow, which is not ideal. A window behind me is a disaster because glare on the screen is straining and forces body contortions.
  • Avoid too much blue in your screens. On Windows 10, you can change the color balance in the “night light” settings and turn on the night light all the time. But remember to turn it off when you are shopping online, or you’ll be surprised at colors when they arrive.
  • Give yourself opportunities to move. I use three different computers and switch between them. One on a normal desk, another set up for standing, and a third on a lap board in an easy chair. In the course of the day, I use all three. I use Dropbox to keep my working files in sync so I can switch from one computer to another without messing around with copying files or thumb drives.
  • An adjustable office chair with good lumbar support helps. You can spend thousands of dollars on a luxurious ergo chair, but I like one I bought at Ikea. I prefer chairs without arms.
  • As far as I am concerned, the best keyboards were made by IBM in the 1980s. My favorite keyboard is over thirty years old and still the best.

This covers the most important stuff. I still put in long days in my home office, but I have fewer aches and pains today than I had ten years ago.

However, I repeat: your mileage will vary.

Posted on

Chicago Conversations

This morning, I spoke with four alumni from the University of Chicago, the institution where I received bachelor’s and master’s degrees close to fifty years ago. The experience was instructive and pleasant.

Fifty alumni signed on to a Zoom meeting. The meeting leaders then randomly paired the participants into two-person breakout rooms to talk privately for ten minutes. When the time was up, the moderators returned us to the full meeting, then paired us up randomly again. Rinse and repeat four times.

We were geographically dispersed. I’m in the northwest corner of the country next to the Salish Sea and close to the Canadian border. I first spoke with a fellow in New York whose partner is a nurse at one of the Columbia hospitals; then a Chicago architectural history graduate student locked in her parent’s apartment in a northern Chicago suburb; next a recent business and econ graduate only 160 miles south of me in the Washington State capital, Olympia; and finally, a sociology graduate student on a fellowship at Oxford in Britain.

Our experiences were widely disparate. The young woman in the Chicago suburb had not been outside in two weeks. I made her jealous by telling her about the goose sitting on her clutch of eggs on the island in the middle of the pond that Albert The Imperious Border Collie walks me around each morning and evening. The guy in New York discussed toilet paper shortages and supply-chain interruptions with me.

In breakout with the sociology grad at Oxford, we discussed the implications of the pandemic for broadband connections for the disadvantaged. I am optimistic— the network infrastructure has already been significantly strengthened in the past two months of increased network traffic. Comcast has offered two months of free broadband here. These signs generate optimism in me that we will soon see a TVA-like initiative for broadband connections. She was less enthusiastic, perhaps from her more global perspective.

For the architectural history student, I acted professorial and turned to my shelf to pull out a copy of the bible of software design patterns, which was inspired by the building architect, Christopher Alexander, who happens to be from the era she is studying. She, in turn, gave me a reference to blob architecture, which is an architectural term derived from the software term, Binary Large Object, the subject of Big Data analysis. A cross-disciplinary moment.

The business and econ major in Olympia and I discussed lobbying the Washington State legislature in Olympia for continued support for public libraries.

The pandemic bringing a diverse group closer together.