Morning Pages: April 5th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the D.C. metro region has been in a state of lockdown. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Hmm, I saw a video of some German Shepherd puppies crawling around that I thought was super cute, but I can't find it at the moment.

I think yesterday went better than I could have hoped. It's really, really nice to have a study buddy during the weekends in order to boost productivity. I ended up spending a few hours with somebody in order to see whether we could roll our own teleconferencing solution. The answer is yes, but the financial cost is, well, no. Unless we deploy our own video / audio server, in which case yes if we can guarantee it turns on only for the duration of the meeting, where the cost would be a few cents per session regardless of number of participants or the session length. For me, this is another valuable data point behind how I might benefit strongly from having a suite of CloudFormation templates to deploy specific applications readily and easily.

I don't like how my mom says I should stay home for the next two weeks no matter what because the virus lingers in the air for a maximum of 24 hours. But I also appreciate and understand the severity of the situation. My parents are looking at models which make the high point sometime in mid-April; I'm thinking it might be early May or later given how some states are still not yet locked down.

I do have a number of other technical items on my backlog of things to do today, and hopefully I'll take a good swing at them.