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June 29, 2020 images

Quibi

I originally tried Quibi and forgot about it. The high production quality 10-minutes series made for a phone form factor are novel. The team behind the company is impressive. However the initial shows were not interesting enough to keep me hooked.

QuibiQuibi

I watched Chrissy’s Court and the Most Dangerous Game. Chrissy’s Court is cute. Yet, it is one of so many similar shows. The Most Dangerous Game packs too much action squeezed into a short amount of time. It overwhelmed me. I rather enjoy a slower build up. Although nowadays even Dirty Harry chasing Scorpio starts to push the limits of my patience. (Check out part two if you want to see it all the way through and want to feel lucky.)

When I have 10 minutes, I prefer to scroll through Twitter and watch the clips from the Lincoln Project.

This weekend I gave Quibi another shot. I enjoy that it is high quality. I gravitated towards the non-fiction shows: NBC news, BBC News around the world, Vox Answered, the Weather Channel, and the cuteness of The Dodo.

I also noticed that there are a lot of more shows that peak my interested as well: The Shape of Pasta, &Music, Cup of Joe, I promise, Gone Mental. I haven’t started watching them.

My first second impression is that this platform would serve me well to watch quality news and documentaries. I already tend to weed through YouTube for The John Oliver Show, the Rachel Maddow Show, and a summary of the daily news from NBC or ABC.

I initially though Quibi would become a paid version of what I already can watch on YouTube, including documentary videos. Or a Netflix for the impatient. No thank you.

However, I can see them become for video what Gimlet Media is for podcasts: high quality, short but not too short. I enjoy the 20 minute podcasts from Gimlet. A 2-hour Joe Rogan chat, or 1-hour Bill Burr ramble are no my cup of tea.

Where Netflix hosts the equivalent of This American Life, Serial or Wait wait don’t tell me, Quibi could become the platform for the video versions of Planet Money, The Gist, and 99% Invisible. I would pay for that.

June 28, 2020

california sunsetcalifornia sunset

June 27, 2020 images

Covid keeps landing its punches

Our son got an email this evening from his university in Los Angeles. that alters the on campus housing situation drastically. Previously assigned housing situations are re-evaluated. One student per room. Two per room if you are in an apartment. However, previous assignments no longer hold. We start from all over again.

I am sympathetic to the university’s decision. A university campus can be very difficult to control.

Yet, at the same time, the change is unsettling to him. It makes you ponder if it makes sense to go on campus all together. What if we sit out a semester and take the classes over Zoom.

I am already firmly into the work-at-home camp for the remainder of the year. I don’t see much benefit to go back into the office. Perhaps, I’ll make an in person appearance here or there, just to see a familiar face in person, rather than over Zoom or Meet.

He has to make a decision in the coming week if he will back on campus or not.

Here is the disturbing trend of confirmed cases for California, with Los Angeles leading the trend.

California Confirmed CasesCalifornia Confirmed Cases

I appreciate how Chris Cuomo is more direct about reporting the news.

June 26, 2020

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June 26, 2020 images

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June 24, 2020 images

The punches are starting to land

At the same time, this is what California unity looks like: Wear your mask!

June 24, 2020

Hey - First Impressions

Hey.com, the new email service from Basecamp, got into some early controversy on the Apple Appstore. This however bought them a great deal of free press. It was akin the unbreakable windows on the Tesla Truck. I still think that was all planned and a smart guerrilla marketing trick from Elon.

The ImboxThe Imbox

The news about Hey’s email application peeked my interested. I applied and got an invitation today. My first impressions are quite favorable: finally some innovation in email.

  • The Imbox is a cute idea. I’ve seen experimentations before on processing your inbox smarter. I like the concept of the Set Aside and Reply Later Piles. It is sort of how I work already. Since Hey gives you a new email address, I haven’t received sufficient email to see its true effect of the Imbox.
  • Similarly I haven’t received much email to make an opinion about the Feed.
  • I love the Paper Trail, as a place to keep all your receipts, confirmations and tickets. That seems very practical.
  • Screener is a good idea as well, although I do not receive a lot of unwanted email in my personal inbox. I do get a lot of LinkedIn requests however.
  • I loath email signatures. After the first email exchange and introduction, I don’t need to be reminded in every email who you are. You end up with long strings of email signatures. The fact that hey doesn’t support email signatures shows the developers have good taste.
  • I am excited about the Note To Self feature. I often want to write something down and don’t like to email myself the note. I wonder how it will work out in practice. A feature I would appreciate more is the ability to mark up an email and highlight sections. Perhaps that’s what Clips are for in Hey, although I never got that feature to work. You suppose to only have to highlight the text to save it to Clips.

Note to SelfNote to Self

There are some items missing from Hey:

  • I use the Send Later feature in Gmail extensively. It buys me peace of mind: the email is “sent”, but I won’t get the response yet until much later. It allows me to stay uninterrupted and focussed.
  • Auto-labels - I use labels extensively and assign them using filters and rules. I didn’t see that capability in Hey.
  • The contacts section appears too limited. I need a full contact option with phone, address, URL, and not just an email contact list. A simple integration with LinkedIn, and social media profiles is quite powerful to get more information on the sender without having to leave email.

Hey.com won’t be free. After the two week trial, the service will cost $99/year. That may be worth it. At least it ain’t the SuperCost from SuperHuman ($30/month). Plus unlike SuperHuman, I got a free trial.

However, a two-week trial is too short. I am suffering from Gmail-separation angst. So much of my life and my workflow is in Gmail. Plus since custom domains are not supported by Hey, and you can not change the send-from address, it feels like a shotgun wedding. You have to make an early commitment to be all in. There are other reasons I don’t want to give up my Gmail, such automatically adding calendar invites to Google Calendar.

I wish Hey would allow me to get more drunk on their interface and capabilities first, before I need to make a larger commitment. I suspect more will be in the same boat.

As lucky as the Apple controversy may have been for them, the lack of a smoother and more gradual switch-over may be their demise.

June 24, 2020

The H1B suspension is shortsighted

As the VP of Engineering for a small Silicon Valley software company, it has been difficult to recruit talented engineers.

Today’s announcement that “Trump Suspends Visas Allowing Hundreds of Thousands of Foreigners to Work in the U.S.” made that task so much harder.

In a sweeping order, which will be in place at least until the end of the year, Mr. Trump blocked visas for a wide variety of jobs, including those for computer programmers and other skilled workers who enter the country under the H-1B visa

The reaction on Twitter was swift.

If you ever have gone to a software engineering college recruiting event, it is clear that there is a shortage of US students opting for a STEM career. However, the real problem may be even further upstream: there is a shortage in computer science professors to teach those students.

I learned quite a bit about this when my son applied to university. Many universities have limits on the number of computer science students they can accept. That is hard to understand. I get that there is a limit on structural engineers or on architecture students, as the university needs to invest in equipment and building material. However, almost every student already arrives on campus with the equipment needed to write their first Python program. A computer lab can not be that expensive for a university, compared to so many other facilities they opt to erect and maintain. The issue is not the facilities.

The truth is a shortage of docents. Those who in the past would opt for an academic career, are now all working for on of the big software companies: Google. Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft. They are often doing similar research work as they would have done as a university professor, except they are making quite a bit more money now. It is in the interest of all technology companies to bring more docents back to the university.

Thus rather than turning off the H1B spigot, the government should be opening all spigots which get us more US STEM students and docents. Until them limiting H1B visas will only crush the hopes and dreams of so many talented people and harm software companies. Many of them will start looking beyond our borders to open up another location. It is shortsighted.

June 22, 2020

An almost perfect Father’s Day in a nutshell

  • Early Sunday morning 6:30am while everybody was still asleep and the only noise you could hear were the birds outside, and the cats looking for food. It was great to catch up on saved articles and read a bit.
  • Breakfast: crepes and fresh fruit with a cappuccino

  • Nice cards and a few gifts: Haribo dummies and pork bbq spices. Love them.
  • Lunch: pasta with shrimp and fresh tomato

  • Banjo practice: boil them cabbage down. Sorry neighbors.
  • A neighborhood walk with my family. I did my civic duty and reported a bunch of illegal dumping in the neighborhood to San Jose’s 311 service.
  • A FaceTime call with my son - who is not home at the moment. Hence, an almost perfect Father’s Day.
  • A haircut in the backyard.
  • Dinner: sushi from Tokyo Sushi, our local favorite Japanese restaurant.
  • A toast to our anniversary - my wife and I met 23 years ago in San Francisco.
  • Today, I had time to write and create this new microblog.

June 21, 2020