Friday, September 11th, 2020
Seriously, who needs to go back to a physical office to work? I find I am quiet happy working from home. I can structure the day as I please. I get far more done than when physically in the location where I am supposedly working, and my colleagues report the same.
The only thing I really miss is travel, to interact with clients. It is so much easier to get things done in person in these remote places which often are communication challenged. For instance, I am focusing on Ethiopia at the moment. Half the time the internet is shut down, making it very hard to interact remotely. Other than that, I find, I am perfectly fine not seeing most of the people in the office; though I do miss the social interactions and the chance meetings.
Maybe I have been part of a global team, but sitting in locations not connected to that team, for so long that it does not really matter where my desk is located as for my work over the past ten years it did not really make a difference.
Currently my travel is between my inside office, my outside office and my living room as I change locations depending on comfort throughout the day. My breaks are for lunch, which is now on Asia time as in at noon, and my pool time, which typically is somewhere between 16:00 and 17:00.
EM and I have a happy coexistence, replacing our dinner chats with lunch chats. I feel, she may need some help or push to drive her CAS project over the finish line, so am planning to make some time this or next weekend to work on that.
Otherwise I have been staying of Twitter and the news feed mostly to detox; just focusing on COVID-19 reports, rather than the politics, which are mind-blowingly frustrating. I just cannot understand how anyone with more than two brain cells can support the GOP, especially given recent news on information wihtheld, election meddling and so on.
Globally 28.3 million cases have been reported ads of today. The USA accounts for 6.33 million, roughly half of which have been reported as recovered. The death toll is approaching 200k at 197k today. Turns out the virus was in the USA in December already, happily spreading. This aligns with findings that it was already virulent in China in November. At the same time the strategy employed in the USA is: Don’t test, don’t see and miraculously it is all good, when it is not. All of science says more testing and tracking is needed to get th spread under control; well the USA is marching in the opposite direction, which may be one of the reasons for sustained high infections.
There are more ways to detect mass infections. Who would have thought that analyzing feces is the most reliable way to prove the virus is in the body? Then again I have come across a number of articles where Universities use this in lieu of mass testing.
This is big news today is: not only is Bahia becoming part of phase 3 trials for Sputnik V, the Russian vaccine, they have also signed up to buy 50 million doses if it proves viable. What is safe and what is not?
Seem’s like meeting friends in groups of less than ten outdoors is safe, while dinning out is not. So good thing I have been equipping my house for winter outside entertainment.