How are you today?

[Shimmin]

@yashima

But they very much ignore the camera, look everywhere and nowhere and probably forget it is on.

One of the oddities is that in person, you don’t sit two feet from everyone’s faces and stare into their eyes but that’s what video-on defaults to. I’d much prefer it if people had a camera stuck somewhere nearby, off at an angle, for a more natural conversational feel.* You can always look into the camera if you want to make a point, like you might turn to look at the person you’re addressing in a meeting, but the rest of the time you’re vaguely looking around or making notes, or checking the agenda.

*I won’t be doing this though, as my wife has a dread of anything resembling a surveillance device. No webcams.

[RogerBW]

I’ve heard various comments that Jitsi could do with consistent position ordering, so that if I’m in the bottom left of my screen I can point “up” and everyone can see whom I’m pointing at.

Most of my videoconferencing is online games, where it’s a small group and nice to be able to see people’s expressions. I’ve done that audio-only, but apart from anything else it’s hard to tell whether someone’s just being fairly quiet or actually dropping off-line but the software hasn’t noticed yet. (OK, one of my regular players naturally sits very still, but that’s a separate consideration.)

[yashima]

That really looks… broken? It is fascinating how much of an image is still there,.

[dscheidt]

@Shimmin

@yashima

But they very much ignore the camera, look everywhere and nowhere and probably forget it is on.

One of the oddities is that in person, you don’t sit two feet from everyone’s faces and stare into their eyes but that’s what video-on defaults to. I’d much prefer it if people had a camera stuck somewhere nearby, off at an angle, for a more natural conversational feel.

This is how most of the people I work with are doing it. Many use a dedicated video conferencing device, and are looking at the computer screen, others use a laptop camera, but look at an external monitor.

[tomm_archer]

This is something I accidentally do. My work laptop screen is always treated as secondary to my home monitor. With the webcam being on the laptop I never end up looking at who I’m talking to.

[Shimmin]

Unrelated frustration: my senior has been (rightly) grumbling about us being CC’d into far too many conversations and clogging up the inbox.

Today she’s working in a different inbox as cover… and seems to be CC’ing mine into every conversation…

[RogerBW]

“Use a mail client that has proper filtering.” (“Yes, I know you can’t have one, that’s what you get for buying Microsoft.”)

Mind you, although there is an “everybody” alias address at work, nobody uses it; so I’ve chosen a “Cc buddy”, someone I never work with, and anything sent to both her and me will be getting Cced to everybody so gets filed away appropriately.

[dscheidt]

I know all of those words, but I qm unable to figure out what that actually means. I’m pretty sure of the first paragraph, but thé second is beyond me.

Also, my phone is autocompleting only in French, even when I am using the QWERTY keyboard.

[raged_norm]

Fossil hunting on Lyme Regis beach today.

Good times

[RossM]

It’s the best beach for fossiling.

[SteveB_uk]

Visited a Scandinavian Cafe in London today, which has been somewhere I couldn’t go for a yearly visit with friends for the past 2 years because of the pandemic. Also went to Tottenham Court Road Waterstones, where my month book club (Boozy book club, themed cocktails) used to meet until 18 months ago, hopefully back soon.

Anyway, some big moments today that I’ve been looking forward to for ages. I used to live near Tottenham Court Road and walking the streets again felt good.

[Chewy77]

Tired! Three days packing away. Lockdown goes down a level on Wednesday, so we will be able to move next weekend. Thanks Gid for that.

We thought we had got ridden of so much rubbish three years ago before moving to NZ. Guess what? We accumulated some again!

[Brattyjedi]

I’m more than a little stressed.

School starts for me tomorrow. I’ll be teaching in person for the first time since early March 2020. Not sure how that’s going to go practically, but I’m not too worried about my health. My university is requiring masks (which will make students hearing me and vice-versa difficult but is necessary) and is eventually requiring all students, faculty, and staff on campus to be vaccinated with a few grounds for exceptions. The eventually is because they didn’t announce the mandate until about two weeks before the semester would be starting so have to give people time to get two shots if they weren’t already vaccinated. The university is giving $500 to each student and $1000 to each faculty/staff vaccinated by 20 September as incentive to get it done fast if not already. I’m already fully vaccinated and am looking forward to the extra money in my paycheck later in the semester. So that’s all good I guess, and probably the best it’s going to be for now.

My current stress is mostly coming from a slightly different direction. I’m teaching two sections of a class that I’ve taught dozens of times before in person on campus. I’m also teaching one section of that same class as a fully online course with no meeting time element. I’ve never taught a fully online class before. I did the video lecture/discussion “online” classes the past year, but those are closer to in person classes. This is just I post activities, maybe I can record videos for students to watch and maybe they’ll watch them, and they do everything on their own as they want. There’s no interaction between students and me other than me grading their work, unless one of us emails the other. Trying to figure out what to do for this type of class and get it all ready to go is really overwhelming me right now.

[lalunaverde]

@Whistle_Pig

Most of the technical questions I tend to ask lean towards “how would you approach X” rather than anything to which a valid answer would be “I can look that up in the docs/Google/StackOverflow if I need to know”.

On my last job hunt, I had a job interview where the technical interview are literally theoretical questions: “What’s the difference between white box and black box testing?”. Like, mate, I have 6 years experience. Are you sure you want to spend the entire interview asking these questions?

I had a strong suspicion that they seriously lacked know-how, despite the person asking it to be the head of QA. They did offered me a senior position, but I felt like being a big fish in a small pond. More of a “settling down” role.

[Marx]

Reading all these things about interviews confirms my sneaking suspicion that I may be basically unemployable.

I have 2 degrees in physics and worked in an R&D lab for 12 years, but I desperately didn’t want the job (my father owns the company and it is miserable, miserable work: underpaid, underappreciated, overworked, and, to top it all off, I’m a really bad physicist. Good at theoretical concepts, really bad at the number crunching work of doing physics). Since leaving there I got a job at Tim Hortons (a coffee chain that’s more of a minimum-wage-factory slinging coffee than actual work), a small cafe as a barista (where I could make a decent espresso about 75% of the time, a really good one about 10%, and just fuck everything up 15% of the time), and then this job at the game store I’m working at (where, admittedly, I know a lot about games, but my wit and inability to lie is going to get me into deep, deep trouble someday).

I’ve never really had a “real” job. I’ve applied for… hundreds? Probably hundreds.

[Whistle_Pig]

@Marx

my wit and inability to lie

Sounds like you need a job where you are obliged to tell people things they don’t necessarily want to hear! I am also a terrible liar and it’s something of an asset in my work, surprisingly.

[JGD]

@Marx

Good at theoretical concepts, really bad at the number crunching work of doing physics).

Have you ever tried writing software?

[Marx]

I’ve dabbled in writing software. Nothing formal. A lot of advanced physics is basically simple programming (MatLab and Maple being the two I was most familiar with in my education/work). And I suck at those… it’s like learning a language with its own logical systems, and my brain doesn’t parse it correctly.

Basically, I’m bad at slow, systematic approaches to things. I really struggle with anything that is long and meticulous (math equations, programming, filling in forms), and I excel where I can be creative and approach a problem from novel directions whenever the feeling moves me (writing, storytelling, advising, and communication of difficult concepts).

[lalunaverde]

You gotta find your own way, man.

In my experience of hiring people though, I would rather hire someone who knows little about QA but is a good team member, learns quick, and a nice person to be with, than to hiring someone the other way around.

I hired someone whose job history is IT, rather than software development. Knows little about what we do. The most wonderful person out of all my applicants. Gave her a junior role and she took it. A few years later, she works at Victoria Secrets as a Scrum Master and earns more than I do.

[raged_norm]

Travel home from Holiday today. Urgh

Gotta go round Bristol. On a bank holiday.

(For our non-informed users, Bristol is where several motorways meet, cease to be motorways and is also the on the way to two very popular holiday destinations.)