Unlike the missus, I have very thankfully been mostly spared from the whole video conference thing so far. Has anyone been particularly afflicted?
50 thoughts on “April 14, 2020: Zoomed Out”
I have at least one video conference per day, sometimes more. My child and cat have each made multiple cameo appearances.
I lead one every Tuesday and Thursday morning for work (StarLeaf), and we've had 4-5 Zoom chats the past couple weekends. I think they're great, although my beleaguered lower back doesn't deal well with the prolonged sitting.
I have never participated in a Zoom chat, but they still annoy me as they ripped off my name and now I can't focus cuz everyone keeps saying, or typing my name.
It's not because you haven't been invited...
Is this a real-life nickname? That's probably in the upper tier of cool things to be informally called. Though, yeah, all the "Zoom" talk would get old if that was the case. ..
Mostly on line. Origin: When I was played mens fast pitch softball, I hooked up with a team from my home town (I was 22 or so). I hit 2 home runs my first game with that squad. In the second game (of a double header) I pitched and several rockets were hit off of me. Several being more than 10. Almost got my head taken off several times. My high school buddies said the ball not only zoomed off of my bat, but off the opposing players bats as well. It stuck with my home town friends and other teammates I had over the years. The "x" was added when I first signed up for AOL and "zoom" and "zooom" were already taken. I added the "x" then. When I signed up for this second version of the WGOM, I added the ".2"
Still a good story. Thanks!
R. I. P. Jim Frey, manager of the Royals and Cubs, at age eighty-eight.
And R. I. P. Hank Steinbrenner, after a non-corona illness, at age sixty-three.
Jim Frey was the runner-up to Tom Kelly when the Twins were selecting a permanent manager after 1986.
Let’s just say I don’t think the Twins win the World Series with Frey at the helm.
I've had my camera on maybe three times in the nearly three years I've been remote. We've had teleconferencing for a long time so the culture never developed to having video on and no one, save a single person, ever uses it.
Outside of screen sharing, I don't understand why it would ever be used. Why would anyone want to see me while we talk?
Human connection, reading non-verbals. I normally see all my staff in person and we talk about a lot of intense things. Seeing someone face to face can be comforting.
Or scary -- the haircut's more and more overdue
Except for those of us that have already been doing it for years. Did it Saturday and I'm set for a while again.
I got mine in early February. I'd make a joke about thankfully not having much hair but it grows like crazy on the sides and gets to be unsettling visually after a couple months
Runner daughter thinks my side hair is starting to look like Jim from The Office
Mine is almost long enough to go back to the 70s look with a center part. By next month I'll be able to lower it from the tower window for Prince Charming to climb up.
I never get the same feeling from video as I do face to face. It just feels artificial to me.
certainly.
our team meeting was great last week. Got to see people's kids and pets and people were pretty laughing with each other.
I don't want to be on camera, but I think I'm with you here. It's good to see people on video if you can't in person.
My family hasn't worked up to this yet. My mom requested FaceTime and I don't think anybody was willing.
Our family has done three game nights already. It's been good to see everyone. Also we've had a few calls for everyone to see the grandkids since they can't in person. My kids aren't good with telephones yet but they can talk to a computer screen .
We did a video call with my folks on Easter, and the kids loved it. Phone is tough for them, but even really brief video chats seem to trigger those connections.
Our extended-family video call on Easter (which included 6 kids ranging from 16 months to 9 years) taught me that as chaotic as an in-person gathering is, it turns out there are things even more chaotic than getting together in person. 😂
But I still appreciated getting to see my aunties and my cousins and find out a little bit about how they're all doing.
You should see the classroom video lectures the boy does. Poor teachers... I heard her ask the same student to mute his microphone at least 10 times.
My kids haven't had any online school, but my 6-year-old did a Zoom karate class. Hilariously chaotic.
It's weird to me just how much school varies right now for kids. I guess there always was a lot of variation within the classroom, but differences in technology are mean teaching is happening on so many different platforms and in different ways. My kids (grades 1 and 4) have and zero video instruction other than pre-recorded short snippets from teachers that are viewed on their own time. The jalapeno does have a weekly "morning meeting," but that's more just about seeing everyone and doing something fun. (Last week he taught us to play a game called Alibi that the class had played.)
My high schooler has to "check in" to the website each day to report attendance. It's not enough that she's turning in her work on time. Once per week, we get an automated call that she was absent for the day.
The middle schooler doesn't have to check in.
Must have heads in cubes.
What kinds of games?
Scattergories is really simple. People just nominate categories and make their own sheets.
Family Feud was also pretty easy once we found some surveys.
We tried Pictionary last weekend. Pretty awkward and slow, but it was fun to draw.
We also played Scattergories last week, and Trivial Pursuit. One brother likes to host "Initials" from KFAN.
My father, who's going on 90, told me these calls have been great -- there are great grandkids (or even grandkids and their spouses for that matter) who he will never get to meet otherwise.
Definitely.
My comment had to do with work Zooms, not personal. I understand why family wants to see each other. I don't understand why a random salesperson that I've never met in person would think video-calls would be good.
Yeah, in-person calls for people you've never met seems unnecessary for the most part
To help stay sane, a bunch of my curling buddies got a Discord channel going to bs all day and get online board games going. We use the voice chat often, its been pretty theraputic.
going to bs all day and get online
Say what now?
We have had a weekly Facetime call since Honest Abe was born with the in-laws, so they could watch him (and The Justice) grow up. We've migrated to Zoom to incorporate many others. My family has had three Zoom game nights. Additionally,
we hosted a Seder last week with about twenty people in seven different states.
We had TLO's birthday few weeks back over Facebook Messenger. 16 people over 5 locations, was as good as could have hoped.
I'm sure it depends somewhat on the nature of your work and the type of relationship you have with your colleagues, but for me, I have found it really helpful to see the faces of the people I work with to have a better sense of connection. I don't always turn on my video for larger group meetings, but when, say, two other people and I are reviewing some sketches and talking about a shared vision for art, it's worked well to do that with video.
That said, I don't have a large number of video calls, and I appreciate that we're being encouraged to limit how many meetings are taking place as it would be foolish to simply translate everything to a video meeting just because the technology exists.
I agree, I prefer video on, and that seems to mostly be the norm in the meetings I've been in. Especially for seeing people in my department or other department chairs in the division, it's been nice to see the people that I would normally meet and talk with face-to-face regularly.
For teaching and office hours, I definitely show my video, in hopes of maintaining a little better connection with my students. I certainly don't require them to show their video (WAY too big an intrusion of privacy there....), and it's been about 50/50 as to whether students do or not.
I've always worked on distributed teams so conference calls have been the most common form of meeting I attend. If anyone has their camera turned on, people assume it's a mistake.
I did experience the scenario where someone makes the mistake of bringing their device to the bathroom during a meeting. It was better than that video that went viral because there was audio but no video, so we just suddenly heard a very loud flush. The incident was followed by everyone denying it was them.
My department has been doing Meets meetings every morning for the past month or so. I've actually enjoyed them. Everyone gets distracted for a couple moments of joy when someone's pet wanders into frame, and it's kept things pretty light.
So far as family is concerned, we had one with all of my family (parents, aunt, grandma, cousins) on Easter, and that was a big breath of fresh air.
I guess I'm all for it.
I’m looking forward to the Poissonnière helping me make jambalaya for the first time this afternoon. One of the brightest silver linings to everything is that she’s shown a lot of interest in helping us cook. She’s now helped with several types of bread & cookies, ham hock & mixed bean soup, and meatloaf. The Poissonnière eats more when she helps, and we’ve started a slow correction of what had become a bit of a challenging, limited palate. (I think an ongoing growth spurt has also helped.)
She was pretty adventurous when she was in an in-home daycare (I grew a bit jealous — she was eating a lot of Thai cuisine!), but regressed when she moved to her current child care place. We love it, but the food was much more bland until a recent change in cooks; the new cook was chef/owner of a well-lovedsouthern/eastern Mediterranean restaurant until an auto-immune issue forced her to close several years ago.
sounds like next month's appetite post!
Maybe the ham & bean soup, the meatloaf, or maybe something else. I’m not going to trespass on meat’s home turf.
I wish my wife didn’t have such an aversion to fish and seafood. I generally only get it when we eat out, and that’s off the table at the moment. I’ve really been craving some shrimp scampi lately.
Andalucia was perfect for us because I hate olives and she hates fried seafood. So she got all the olives to herself and I got all the octopus legs. Win-win
I had a phone call with a colleague just now and he commented that I had the classical music playing... real high falutin'! I informed him with a sense of pride that the music was my daughter practicing her piano. 🙂
In simulation results, the Twins won yesterday against Toronto and lost today. They are now 8-10, 5.5 games behind KC. My confidence in MLB playing a single game this year is down. My personal opinion is that they only have a 10% chance of it happening and less than 1% chance of games being played in front of a paying audience. Unless there is a vaccine, I think the 2021 season is in jeopardy. Could be wrong.
I have at least one video conference per day, sometimes more. My child and cat have each made multiple cameo appearances.
I lead one every Tuesday and Thursday morning for work (StarLeaf), and we've had 4-5 Zoom chats the past couple weekends. I think they're great, although my beleaguered lower back doesn't deal well with the prolonged sitting.
I have never participated in a Zoom chat, but they still annoy me as they ripped off my name and now I can't focus cuz everyone keeps saying, or typing my name.
It's not because you haven't been invited...
Is this a real-life nickname? That's probably in the upper tier of cool things to be informally called. Though, yeah, all the "Zoom" talk would get old if that was the case. ..
Mostly on line. Origin: When I was played mens fast pitch softball, I hooked up with a team from my home town (I was 22 or so). I hit 2 home runs my first game with that squad. In the second game (of a double header) I pitched and several rockets were hit off of me. Several being more than 10. Almost got my head taken off several times. My high school buddies said the ball not only zoomed off of my bat, but off the opposing players bats as well. It stuck with my home town friends and other teammates I had over the years. The "x" was added when I first signed up for AOL and "zoom" and "zooom" were already taken. I added the "x" then. When I signed up for this second version of the WGOM, I added the ".2"
Still a good story. Thanks!
R. I. P. Jim Frey, manager of the Royals and Cubs, at age eighty-eight.
And R. I. P. Hank Steinbrenner, after a non-corona illness, at age sixty-three.
Jim Frey was the runner-up to Tom Kelly when the Twins were selecting a permanent manager after 1986.
Let’s just say I don’t think the Twins win the World Series with Frey at the helm.
I've had my camera on maybe three times in the nearly three years I've been remote. We've had teleconferencing for a long time so the culture never developed to having video on and no one, save a single person, ever uses it.
Outside of screen sharing, I don't understand why it would ever be used. Why would anyone want to see me while we talk?
Human connection, reading non-verbals. I normally see all my staff in person and we talk about a lot of intense things. Seeing someone face to face can be comforting.
Or scary -- the haircut's more and more overdue
Except for those of us that have already been doing it for years. Did it Saturday and I'm set for a while again.
I got mine in early February. I'd make a joke about thankfully not having much hair but it grows like crazy on the sides and gets to be unsettling visually after a couple months
Runner daughter thinks my side hair is starting to look like Jim from The Office
Mine is almost long enough to go back to the 70s look with a center part. By next month I'll be able to lower it from the tower window for Prince Charming to climb up.
I never get the same feeling from video as I do face to face. It just feels artificial to me.
certainly.
our team meeting was great last week. Got to see people's kids and pets and people were pretty laughing with each other.
I don't want to be on camera, but I think I'm with you here. It's good to see people on video if you can't in person.
My family hasn't worked up to this yet. My mom requested FaceTime and I don't think anybody was willing.
Our family has done three game nights already. It's been good to see everyone. Also we've had a few calls for everyone to see the grandkids since they can't in person. My kids aren't good with telephones yet but they can talk to a computer screen .
We did a video call with my folks on Easter, and the kids loved it. Phone is tough for them, but even really brief video chats seem to trigger those connections.
Our extended-family video call on Easter (which included 6 kids ranging from 16 months to 9 years) taught me that as chaotic as an in-person gathering is, it turns out there are things even more chaotic than getting together in person. 😂
But I still appreciated getting to see my aunties and my cousins and find out a little bit about how they're all doing.
You should see the classroom video lectures the boy does. Poor teachers... I heard her ask the same student to mute his microphone at least 10 times.
My kids haven't had any online school, but my 6-year-old did a Zoom karate class. Hilariously chaotic.
It's weird to me just how much school varies right now for kids. I guess there always was a lot of variation within the classroom, but differences in technology are mean teaching is happening on so many different platforms and in different ways. My kids (grades 1 and 4) have and zero video instruction other than pre-recorded short snippets from teachers that are viewed on their own time. The jalapeno does have a weekly "morning meeting," but that's more just about seeing everyone and doing something fun. (Last week he taught us to play a game called Alibi that the class had played.)
My high schooler has to "check in" to the website each day to report attendance. It's not enough that she's turning in her work on time. Once per week, we get an automated call that she was absent for the day.
The middle schooler doesn't have to check in.
Must have heads in cubes.
What kinds of games?
Scattergories is really simple. People just nominate categories and make their own sheets.
Family Feud was also pretty easy once we found some surveys.
We tried Pictionary last weekend. Pretty awkward and slow, but it was fun to draw.
We also played Scattergories last week, and Trivial Pursuit. One brother likes to host "Initials" from KFAN.
My father, who's going on 90, told me these calls have been great -- there are great grandkids (or even grandkids and their spouses for that matter) who he will never get to meet otherwise.
Definitely.
My comment had to do with work Zooms, not personal. I understand why family wants to see each other. I don't understand why a random salesperson that I've never met in person would think video-calls would be good.
Yeah, in-person calls for people you've never met seems unnecessary for the most part
To help stay sane, a bunch of my curling buddies got a Discord channel going to bs all day and get online board games going. We use the voice chat often, its been pretty theraputic.
Say what now?
We have had a weekly Facetime call since Honest Abe was born with the in-laws, so they could watch him (and The Justice) grow up. We've migrated to Zoom to incorporate many others. My family has had three Zoom game nights. Additionally,
we hosted a Seder last week with about twenty people in seven different states.
We had TLO's birthday few weeks back over Facebook Messenger. 16 people over 5 locations, was as good as could have hoped.
I'm sure it depends somewhat on the nature of your work and the type of relationship you have with your colleagues, but for me, I have found it really helpful to see the faces of the people I work with to have a better sense of connection. I don't always turn on my video for larger group meetings, but when, say, two other people and I are reviewing some sketches and talking about a shared vision for art, it's worked well to do that with video.
That said, I don't have a large number of video calls, and I appreciate that we're being encouraged to limit how many meetings are taking place as it would be foolish to simply translate everything to a video meeting just because the technology exists.
I agree, I prefer video on, and that seems to mostly be the norm in the meetings I've been in. Especially for seeing people in my department or other department chairs in the division, it's been nice to see the people that I would normally meet and talk with face-to-face regularly.
For teaching and office hours, I definitely show my video, in hopes of maintaining a little better connection with my students. I certainly don't require them to show their video (WAY too big an intrusion of privacy there....), and it's been about 50/50 as to whether students do or not.
I've always worked on distributed teams so conference calls have been the most common form of meeting I attend. If anyone has their camera turned on, people assume it's a mistake.
I did experience the scenario where someone makes the mistake of bringing their device to the bathroom during a meeting. It was better than that video that went viral because there was audio but no video, so we just suddenly heard a very loud flush. The incident was followed by everyone denying it was them.
My department has been doing Meets meetings every morning for the past month or so. I've actually enjoyed them. Everyone gets distracted for a couple moments of joy when someone's pet wanders into frame, and it's kept things pretty light.
So far as family is concerned, we had one with all of my family (parents, aunt, grandma, cousins) on Easter, and that was a big breath of fresh air.
I guess I'm all for it.
I’m looking forward to the Poissonnière helping me make jambalaya for the first time this afternoon. One of the brightest silver linings to everything is that she’s shown a lot of interest in helping us cook. She’s now helped with several types of bread & cookies, ham hock & mixed bean soup, and meatloaf. The Poissonnière eats more when she helps, and we’ve started a slow correction of what had become a bit of a challenging, limited palate. (I think an ongoing growth spurt has also helped.)
She was pretty adventurous when she was in an in-home daycare (I grew a bit jealous — she was eating a lot of Thai cuisine!), but regressed when she moved to her current child care place. We love it, but the food was much more bland until a recent change in cooks; the new cook was chef/owner of a well-lovedsouthern/eastern Mediterranean restaurant until an auto-immune issue forced her to close several years ago.
sounds like next month's appetite post!
Maybe the ham & bean soup, the meatloaf, or maybe something else. I’m not going to trespass on meat’s home turf.
I wish my wife didn’t have such an aversion to fish and seafood. I generally only get it when we eat out, and that’s off the table at the moment. I’ve really been craving some shrimp scampi lately.
Andalucia was perfect for us because I hate olives and she hates fried seafood. So she got all the olives to herself and I got all the octopus legs. Win-win
I had a phone call with a colleague just now and he commented that I had the classical music playing... real high falutin'! I informed him with a sense of pride that the music was my daughter practicing her piano. 🙂
In simulation results, the Twins won yesterday against Toronto and lost today. They are now 8-10, 5.5 games behind KC. My confidence in MLB playing a single game this year is down. My personal opinion is that they only have a 10% chance of it happening and less than 1% chance of games being played in front of a paying audience. Unless there is a vaccine, I think the 2021 season is in jeopardy. Could be wrong.