[Intuition]

I was just curious what everyone here has been up to since this whole quarantine/lockdown began. 

In my world down in Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Marina Del Rey, Los Angeles I had finished a freelance gig on March 11th. I had planned to be off work for about 3-4 weeks when another gig would start at the same place.

We had, in Los Angeles, all been hearing on the radio since late January about the "Wuhan Virus" and for a while no one really took it seriously. 

After it started getting more serious in early March I remember checking the virus map with the red dots every three or four days. Watching New York and Seattle blow up. Meanwhile Los Angeles had 26 cases at one check. 

When my gig ended I remember driving back home and stopping at the Japanese market for my usual yellow tail filets, red snapper, rice, scallions, etc. So I could make some easy dinners the next few nights. 

I was already planning on going to Wyoming to spend spring break with my 12 year old son. 

I was finished on a Wednesday and that Friday I decided to get some tarp for my boat since the rain was going to start and be heavier than normal and I wanted to stave off molds or mildew I had to clean up simply by putting tarp up. 

When I passed Ralphs and Trader Joe's in the marina on my way to Home Depot I saw the first real signs of people freaking out.  The streets leading two blocks in to the markets as well as their entire parking lots were completely full. It was a waiting line. 

I remember seeing people shoving shoulder to shoulder to get in and out of the doors. There wasn't enough room to just walk in and out. It was a sight I had not seen in my entire 25 year run in Los Angeles since 1995. 

I though to myself "If one person has it in that store, the rest of them are getting sick within a week."

I packed my car and tarped the boat Saturday and took off on Sunday heading towards Wyoming. 

At this point there were still under a hundred cases in Los Angeles and like 12 in Utah. It was fairly new. 

When I arrived in Wyoming I decided I was going to get my son for spring break and stay at my mom's because of two things. She lives in a small town in Wyoming where there is likely not going to be a lot of spreading happening yet, if any. Also, my mom is one of the head nurses in Wyoming so she will know quarantine procedure and safety and will likely have the best info. 

My son and I have been here since March and he has been doing remote school. It has been much easier to do remote school than I thought because they use Khan Academy and a few other sites that make the computer learning part very easy. I actually prefer it. He watches videos prepared by teachers for the lessons and then has to do a quiz on Khan Academy, FlipGrid, MobyMax, or similar. 

I brought my primary workstation for VFX with me to do some remote work. Sadly the gig was cancelled as were many gigs in Los Angeles. There is some more work coming but at the moment I am not doing work. Financially I should be fine as long as I start getting work by August/Sept as I save for not having regular work in the first place. Since the gig was cancelled that I was expecting I went ahead and did the Unemployment Insurance that I have not invoked in a very long time and was surprised that it is far more automated now thought they still want very thorough records and weekly job search info... but they did say that due to covid-19 that they would reward benefit from March till end of May without complete job search because of the circumstances. 

Meanwhile I would like to make some more SGI/Irix Software tutorials but I did not bring any of my SGI machines with me. This time afforded would have allowed me to make quite a few of them. I wanted to even make one that was centered around the Irix OS, the UI features, networking, and command line usages. 

When this ends, I imagine, June/July range for Los Angeles to start spooling up again, I will get back to tuts. 

Meanwhile my son has been playing a ton of VR with his Vive. Primarily Half Life Alyx and it really impressed me. It is the first game I have seen that sold me on the VR concept that wasn't a flight or space simulator. 

My brother and his wife and four kids live up here now. He used to prototype for a company in CA and now does it here in Wyoming because.... drum rolll, the owner in CA sold it to China. 

Since they were also quarantined longer than the virus shelf life my mom ok'd visits and my son and his cousins play together and my brother and I play table top games like Wiz War (old school 5th edition version), Robo Rally, or Caracassonne. 

Recently discovered Table Top Simulator and realized we could have been playing those games on line with it. Very cool.

Beyond that I have been making my own IP animation that I will release sometime in 2020. I am pretty excited about it as it is going to be roughly 40 minutes to an hour in length. 

Because I have not been working much since I have arrived I get a shot or two finished each day and the edit is turning out better than I was imagining. 

I do a ton of homecooked food, sandwhiches, etc. 

I usually skateboard and walk the marina. This pandemic has made me lazier than normal and I take more naps. Is that a 42 years old thing or just me being lazy?

I have watched a few of my favorite films. Metropolis (Silent Film, full version on YouTUbe though I have Kino Release Blu Ray),  Secret Of Nimh, Ghost in the Shell, Gamera vs Gyaos, and will be eventually watching Disney's Black Hole 1979, Flash Gordon 1980, and Time Bandits. 

I played through an old C64 game called Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders. Though I found the FM towns version on line and it was a great game that my memory didn't over hype and was still difficult. Also, found Wing Commander Privateer and have started that for an hour every few nights. I think they made the 3d Art in Power Animator. Lovely renders for its time. 

I am lucky in that there are no cases here in my hometown yet. Many symptoms that were tested in a few people that tested false for Covid-19. 

Kind of lucky to have avoided most of the drama in this pandemic. 

Please chime in and tell of your Pandemic experience. 

Game, movie, food, routine recommendations. Etc.

[jan-jaap]

Well, two major changes:

1. I work remotely now. Being a computer programmer this works pretty well. My computer room is my office. This is relatively comfortable: I already had a large desk, good screens etc. I did pick up my chair from work because my own was giving me back problems after a week of sitting on it all day every day.

2. The kids have to be home schooled. This takes up massive amounts of time. Schools re-open next week, but only at half capacity so we still have to home-school them half the time.

We're lucky to live in a comfortable house with a garden. I can imagine that if you're stuck in an apartment with an entire family that you'd be at each others throats after a while.

After spending all day in my computer room (professionally), I usually don't really feel like spending the evening there as well (with my SGIs). But I did finally finish my ethernet and serial wiring:


Top to bottom: a hint of the FC switch, the primary ethernet switch, secondary ethernet switch (mostly older SGIs) and a Cyclades ACS48 serial port server

Next up: FDDI and fibre channel    Oh, and I have to finish two dozen RJ45-to-DB9 breakouts for the Cyclades unit.

[Intuition]

Whoa, look at those nicely strung ethernet short cables.

I used to have a garden back in Venice. I really want to start one again.

[pcar]

I've been fortunate to be 100% WFH for nearly 10 years now, so not much is different for me other than a few changes to the "routine" when i do go out to pick up lunch etc, and having less cars on the road has actually been really nice. The office set up got a few updates, new Mac Pro, 2x 38" wide curved screens, a few other goodies. I'm also blessed that my employer (Fortune 500 investment company) has plenty of cash packed away for times like these. We've seen more stock trades in the last 30 days than in the entire time the company has existed. I'm actually way more busy now than I was previously, we've had a bunch of new projects pop up and we're trying to jam them into the existing timeline. This mostly involves me architecting new Kubernetes cluster deployments in "multi-cloud" setup, 100 nodes in AWS EKS, 100 nodes in GKE, 100 nodes on-prem, all part of the same Kubernetes cluster, running a bunch of AI/ML GPU workloads on recent trades/transactions to look for fraud, money-laundering, etc.

The kids love having school at home and have actually been quite diligent in getting their work done, it is also a huge plus that the school district already had all of their tech in place to support this kind of thing, they were already used to submitting all of their homework online before all of this lockdown happened, and they only have about 2 weeks left this year anyway.

I am the "cook" in the house, so staying in and eating at home, pretty standard thing for us, although we do splurge 1/week and order some takeout from our fav places.

It's hard to get the 2 teens out of their rooms to do "family" stuff, they roll their eyes, groan and say something about "<insert game here> is boring..."

For fun, I usually head over to my friends ranch, we get out the AR's, AK's, etc, and shoot up a bunch of stuff (because Texas). I just started making some custom metal targets and stands, i'll post some pics when i get some built.

Since we are not racing around to all kinds of meetings, soccer practice/games, other school club events, we do all hang out in the back yard each night, i build a fire in the fire pit and we check out the stars/planets with our telescope and also use the "sky guide" app to see what's up there. Then when we see the reflection of eyes in the woods from the fire, we all go back inside, haha.

I do struggle at times to get a good read from the kids on how they are handling all of this, and what the future holds for them. We've had to cancel all of our planned college campus visits, ACT/SAT tests have been postponed, the overall timing for getting all of these college pre-reqs done has gone completely out the window and everything is in flux. Hopefully we can do some "virtual" visits, if for no other reason than getting our names on "the list" that is referenced when they read your entrance submission.

We're plugging away, making the best of it that we can, dealing with issues as they come up and trying to look forward to things getting better, but I think we are going to see a new "norm" established soon, and we'll all be dealing with that in our own ways. I hope everybody stays safe, and is able to get through this.

[Intuition]

Last year when I worked at Nomad edit in Santa Monica we used AWS for cloud rendering. I wonder if that is the same AWS nodes you are referring to?

My brother did come over last weekend to shoot his guns. We both have modern SKS rifles. He has a Kimber 1911 and I have the same old Beretta Elite 2 I have had for a while now because it just works for me. I didn't join him though as it was windy and cold and I told him I'll head out in a couple weeks when the wind dies down.

I must say I envy the backyard firepit. When my brother lived in Santa Rosa CA, we would use his firepit in the backyard for grilling and marshmellows.

I haven't had access to a good planet looking scope since the 90s. I did notice Venus looking brighter than usual about two weeks ago towards the west from southwest Wyoming bewteen 8-9:30 pm. Up here in Wyoming when the sky is clear it is unreal how many stars and even the faint glow of the milky way can be seen. In June you can just see the shape of Andromeda in the sky without a scope if you are not near city lights. Looks like a little smudge.

[GeekLucanis]

I've been doing rather uninteresting things. Just general upkeep- ordered parts for machines that have been out of commission, or my furniture that was slowly falling apart from my lack of attention. I did snag a few items to tinker with in the couple weeks- I bought a 2011 Mac Mini from Raion, a Toughbook CF-U1, and a Toshiba Libretto coming in from Japan.
I've also started a new routine of walking 3 days a week to get healther, as when I was working- it was a driving job and I didnt get a lot of exercise in. Its been worse since the shutdown, as I've put on a few pounds.

[Raion]

Working on some software projects, revising my novel (still not done, kill me now) and fixing things around the house that were broken.

[commodorejohn]

Sleeping in, reading manga, and really truly intending to get some work done on several of my many different hobby projects.

[Jacques]

Not much has changed for me work wise, apart from doing my work at my desk at home vs. sitting in an office. I manage a team of 4 people and do so via teams, email and phone calls. My architectural work is easily translated to home working.

Shopping / going out is a lot more constrained on account of being in the high risk category due to my asthma. So my wife goes into shops etc. for us.

The biggest benefit for me is not spending £250 on petrol a month for travel, but most importantly I get 3 hours a day back by not having to commute to work. 

My health has improved as I don't have to inhale city fumes everyday and I feel much better in myself. I don't want to work in an office ever again!

[Irinikus]

I thinks a positive spinoff from this whole lockdown thing will be the fact that many people will continue to work form home, and this will result in allot less wastefulness and pollution!

And less traffic for people such as myself, who will still have no choice but togo into work on a daily basis! Even though I generally don't experience allot of traffic on the way to work! (The less other people I see on the road, the better though!)

It was always going to go that way anyway eventually (especially with the coming 5G infrastructure!), it's just been helped along by the present situation!