fridaynight.20200626
The punches are starting to land
Gov. @GavinNewsom shares stunning number of new #COVID19 cases in CA over the past 3 days:
— ABC7 News (@abc7newsbayarea) June 24, 2020
June 21: 4,230 new cases
June 22: 5,019 new cases
June 23: 7,149 new cases
That's a 69% increase in 2 days. https://t.co/HGRf0Nr7ah
The real news today is that the U.S. set a record for new cases today: 38,672.
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 24, 2020
The previous record was April 25 at 36,001. pic.twitter.com/pcFcLUeeKk
At the same time, this is what California unity looks like: Wear your mask!
Wear your mask.
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 22, 2020
Help slow the spread of #COVID19.
Just do it. pic.twitter.com/ZvCmkQAWrL
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 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 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.
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.
It’s pretty incredible how many of the smartest people in Silicon Valley came here on H1B visas.
— Austen (@Austen) June 22, 2020
We’re probably talking millions of jobs created.
The world is not zero sum.
Immigration has contributed immensely to America’s economic success, making it a global leader in tech, and also Google the company it is today. Disappointed by today’s proclamation - we’ll continue to stand with immigrants and work to expand opportunity for all.
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) June 22, 2020
every person I’ve ever met that came here on a H1B visa has been extraordinary at what they do. Cutting H1B visas means racism and nationalism are more important than all the advances in science, technology, and economics those workers consistently deliver.
— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) June 23, 2020
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.
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.
Covid-19 sneaker punches
The last day I worked in the RTI office was March 5th. I have been working from home ever since. In practice that meant I first set up shop in my son’s room as he has a nice desk and lots of sunlight. As he needed his room for his university Zoom sessions, I moved into the garage. I am living the Silicon Valley dream, together with one of our cats, Gemelli.
From the get-go, our family has taken covid-19 seriously. We stayed home. We washed and washed our hands. We masked and gloved up. We rarely went out for groceries, and figured out how to get groceries delivered. When the delivery arrives, we go in full blown pandemic mode. Non-perishables go in quarantine for multiple days, including the mail, and any Amazon packages. Perishables go through a thorough cleaning process. When all is done, the kitchen smells like a chemical plant.
We’re not alone in this. Santa Clara county was one of the first to act. California also has done a great job overall. But we are far from conquering this virus. Nothing really has changed. We don’t have a vaccine or treatment. We only flattened the curve and bought ourselves some time. So now is not the time to take our eye off the ball - regardless of all the other bad things happening in the country right now.
From my weekend reading, the following charts and articles caught my eye:
1. Things will likely get a lot worse soon
.
Go check out John Hopkins Corona Virus US Map for your area. I am paying especially attention to Santa Clara county where we live, and also to Los Angeles county where my son goes to university.
Santa Clara County remains well organized with a good number of ICU beds, ventilators available. The New Cases trend showed that the Shelter in Place order was working. However, we need to pay attention now. It is going the wrong direction.
Santa Clara County
(source: LA Times)
Los Angeles county is completely different story. LA county has among the highest confirmed covid-19 cases. The more troubling aspect is that the trend of New Cases for Los Angeles county has been entirely going the wrong direction. It never got a reprieve.
Los Angeles County
(source: LA Times)
The LA Times website has a lot of great info.
2. It is not time to starting dancing yet
If you want to make the Herd Immunity argument, please go check out a great Medium post about how Sweden fared.
“Sweden is suffering tremendously in cases and deaths. Yet few people have been infected yet. They are a long way from Herd Immunity.”
The article compares Sweden’s strategy with the alternative approach: the Hammer and Dance.
“The other strategy is the Hammer and the Dance: Aggressively attack the coronavirus by locking down the economy. Once curbed, jump into the Dance by replacing the aggressive lockdown with cheap and intelligent measures to control the virus.”
3. “Belgium had the worst response”
Beyond the USA, I pay attention to Belgium and Argentina, where our families live. Recently, there has been a lot of bad press, especially from the Economist, about Belgium.
“Belgium had the worst response to the coronavirus crisis out of OECD countries.”
Chart
However, the truth is more nuanced.
“Only Belgium has a higher share of care home deaths, and that’s because they are one of the few countries that also count suspected deaths from coronavirus in care homes as official cases. … Half of the country’s deaths are in care homes, but of those only 5% have been tested. 95% have simply been assumed to be caused by the coronavirus. It also suffered from a massive initial peak that has since been controlled.”
Throughout these past months, I kept reading the Belgian newspapers. I can assure you, there were no statements about hydroxychloroquine or injections with disinfectant from the government. When the dust settles, I fear Brazil and the USA may come out on top of the worst response.
4. Pay attention to the transmission rate
A great resource to track is http://rt.live, showing the Rt value for covid-19 per state. Rt is the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If Rt is above 1.0, the virus will spread quickly. When Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading. For example, take a look at California, currently at Rt=1.05.
Yet another blog platform
The internet has given us plenty of megaphones to get our viewpoints heard, or to document our on-goings, from the many blog platforms, to a plethora of social media and new content sharing sites (a la Medium).
Recently, we have gravitated to the quick commentary-style places: Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, or Nextdoor. We love adding our two cents or rant about Karen.
Few of the currently popular places encourage prose, with Medium and in a way Mailchimp being the exceptions. The blogs from 10 years ago have gone stale, including my own. Almost twenty years, I had started hosting my own little website at Earthlink.net. When Blogger launched I created breydel.blogspot.com. It has since evolved into a more of a travel picture log. I have occasionally written a blogpost for the company I work for. However, it does take some effort to write a nice blog entry.
That’s when I stumbled onto microblogs - quick updates of what’s going on. It is okay to add a picture or video here and there, or a few interesting links and podcasts. Most blog entries are less than 500 words, and don’t have all about a single theme. Medium seems too serious for that. Twitter is too limited and overwhelming.
Microblogs are not new. They are new to me. I never jumped onto the now-stranded Tumblr wagon. Micro.blog looked interesting. Then I discovered blot.im. I like the markdown and dropbox driven approach, and the fact that I can write from any device in markdown.
I’ll continue to maintain breydel.blogspot.com, primarily with travel information. More serious topics will go to medium/@waffletchlgy. @waffletchnlgy remains rant-central (although I rarely rant). I uninstalled Instagram from my phone, so I don’t plan to post a lot of new pictures.
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