That’s nearly as bad as what the approved name for the phizer is. “Corinthian” oh wait, that’s chysler’s upholstery. comirnaty is what the morons at phizer came up with. No idea how you pronounce that (and I heard it prounced a dozen times yesterday.)
(Moderna will be ‘spikevax’, once it’s approved here.)
Vaxzeveria has an extremely well developed backstory that charts his rise from idealistic young Navy Cadet to Dread Imperator of the Rimward Expanse, full of tradegy and small abuses of power and opportunity as he navigates the interstellar conflict precipated by the arrival of the N’thylla Swarm.
Plus that reveal in the second book that Spikevax is his father.
Excuse me. Can you please blur spoilers.
I had a terrible case of Vaxzevria after a night out in Swansea
I keep reading it as “Vax everyone” so the natural jump for my brain is:
Throw a priest and you have the South American version…
Had another work-team-pub-lunch today, it’s good to be seeing them in person more regularly.
Also, couldn’t remember what the latest restaurant rules were so wore my mask as a pocket square just in case I needed it:
I have had my first few days of work on the new project. All remote and the team is really nice and today I helped fix my first bug by applying some google mojo and backwards thinking 
It is nice to find out I still know how to problem solve even when I have next to no knowledge of the specific domain I am applying my skill to.
Yesterday, was the end of the sprint and the resulting meeting marathon was a bit tiring. I haven’t had a lot of remote meetings in my previous projects and definitely nothing like this. How do people even do video chat all day? I find listening stressful but video even more so…
But overall it is nice to be doing something useful and–at some point–getting paid for it. After more than 2 years without paid work and more than 1 year without enough muse to be working on my writing this is a welcome change.
I, too, have used a mask as a pocket square. It works surprisingly well!
We’ve rarely turned video on for meetings since we started WFH and I don’t think we suffer from it.
At several points over-eager managers have suggested it, but we normally counter that we can actually work during meetings without seeming rude.
I only use it at the moment for one on one meetings with my manager. I’ve had one of those so far this year 
As for sprint meetings, I survive by being the one that is talking for the majority of the meeting.
I am unendingly thankful that video is never a requirement for the meetings where I work – a company where more than half of the employees are remote/work-from-home, even without COVID considerations.
In fact, you can tell which people are currently working from home but don’t usually, because those are the people that tend of voluntarily enable video on calls.
As someone who leads a lot of meetings with groups of people, I don’t think they need to see my moving face for the duration, my Skype photo will do just fine. It also means that in the moments where I’m not speaking, I get to relax a little.
This just popped up on my Twitter feed, how timely:
Yeah I like to check in with cameras on and then say people can turn them off
Something learnt from talking to people about the impacts of masks obscuring faces, some people rely on lip reading (even subconsciously) to aid their listening. Hence when I speak on video call, I’ll always make sure I have the camera on. In a general meeting when I’m a passive participant, I typically won’t bother.
From the other side though, teaching remotely when no one has a camera on is extremely tough, as you get hardly any read on how the audience are receiving your lecture material.
Something interesting that I’ve noticed about people’s reactions to replacing in-person meetings with video calls, is that a lot of the things people find difficult about them are things that I find difficult about regular face-to-face meetings:
Essentially, I’ve come to the conclusion that “zoom fatigue” is a tiny taste of being autistic for neurotypical people. With a huge caveat that not all autistic people are the same, and there are lots of other reasons why people might find social interaction tiring.
In my 4 days on the project, I have noted that this team has the camera always active for any chat, even just while working on code together. But they very much ignore the camera, look everywhere and nowhere and probably forget it is on. I feel like it is going to take me another week to start acting like it isn’t there. For now I feel watched and like I have to pay attention. But I will not be able to keep that up. So ignoring is the way to go. I’ve given up feeling selfconscious how I look on camera a while ago that’s not it. Mostly, I don’t want to act like I am not paying attention but seeing how everyone else doesn’t bother… I hope I’ll adjust soon.
Eye-contact is hard. Among my local circle I count as the extrovert and yet to hold eye contact I have to make a conscious effort and an effort it is even with my closest friends. Probably shows that among the blind, the one-eyed is the extrovert For real though. Techies…
Also re: myself …
I have been doing useful things for the past many months. It is just that I have been socialized to undervalue unpaid, care and emotional work… which is what I’ve been doing a LOT of. But instead I measure my own worth by the kind of paid work I am doing. I shouldn’t. I hate that I do this and that despite having many a discussion about it with my partner I cannot shake this type of thinking. Also, on occasion I really like the smug feeling I get from bug fixing. There is a sense of feedback and accomplishment one gets from my kind of technical work that is extremely hard to generate from emotional/care work which I find hard to even consider “work” even when it exhausts me.
We default to video on, which considering we sell stufff for video calling isn’t too surprising. But people turn cameras off if they don’t want them on, they ignore the camera, whatever. I’d be happy to have voice converstaions, but everything is video. it’s a little weird to be talking to someone via video, when neither of you is paying attention to the camera, because you’re looking at a text editor.
I was in a big (70ish people in attendence) meeting (think morbidity and mortality review, but for software) this morning, and was surprised how many people who weren’t going to say anything had their video on the whole time. Mangers I get, they have to make it clear they’re paying attention, but engineering staff was a bit surprising.
