Category: Online Meetings

(Potential) Future Modern Discourse

AMC theaters and Zoom have announced a collaboration. Big-ass Zoom meetings with a group of people in each the theater (17 cities so far).

I think the Libertarian Party should use this technology to conduct this sort of event, to nail down what they want their official party platform should be.

Once a month, every month, a new topic is tackled. Once we get all the topics defined, we wrap around and revisit each topic, to see if it needs some realignment. Perhaps new technology brings about some change that gives us reason to adjust a position.

Then, anyone running for office who wants the Libertarian Party endoorsement would need to pledge to support all the topics defined. Also, any Libertarian candidate should know what the party stands for, as declared by it’s membership.

Once a month, dinner and a movie, except instead of a movie broadcast into your brain, you get to interactively participate in building the future.

COVID-19, new water heater, WordPress annoyances, Zoom meetings, oh my

Wow a lot of stuff has happened since my last post. I’m still catching up; but, I didn’t want to go too long without pointing out I’m still alive.

COVID-19: John Hopkins University has some computer science students who are doing data gathering and mapping that on to ArcGIS. The web page works as a status report of where we are today. Thanks to Ars Technica for the original article.

Today, Italy went over the 10,000 dead mark.

New Water Heater: I went two weeks without hot water. I am grateful this was before COVID-19, because I used my gym membership for my daily hot shower. In fact, a friend of mine, way back when, pointed out that if you ever go homeless, a gym membership is a way to stay human for around $20 per month.

And now the gyms are closed due to COVID-19. Well that hurts the homeless even more.

The whole water heater debacle deserves a post of it’s own, so I will do that, later.

WordPress Annoyances: there are things that don’t work, and, the WordPress Support Forums are a mass of dead and empty posts of people asking for help. Other forms of help don’t seem to be, either.

I want to migrate between sites, and from single-site to multisite, but man this stuff just does not work.

Zoom Meetings: Man oh man, I wish I had listened to my stock picking guys when they said Zoom was the new hotness in video conferencing over the Internet. Zoom stock price has nearly doubled since then. And now, even I use Zoom, and I know of three people who signed up to pay a monthly subscription. By the way, Discord is pretty cool, too.

Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves that they couldn’t leverage their leadership with Skype and Teams into being the industry leader. Of course Google had a shot way back when with Hangouts, too. Google though is just kind of a big failure to get anything done since merging with Doubleclick and abandoning the whole “Don’t be evil” motto.