Done Since 2020-03-15

It's been an eventful week, for sufficiently negative values of events. I'm still obsessively following pandemic-related links, but I've at least managed to turn that... research?... into more posts. And I've been singing a little more. Aside from that I've been doing even less than usual.

Several events have moved to online venues -- in particular see Filk Streams – Where to find the best Fannish concerts online, Festival of the Living Rooms on FB (I'm currently watching/listening to Cheshire Moon there), and Filk in the Time of Plague | File 770.

I'm trying to find a video conferencing app that would work for my singing teacher. (I'll post about that in more detail later this afternoon, I think.) I think the minimum requirement would be the ability to play on a MIDI keyboard and hear it synchronized with the student's singing along, rather than hearing it locally. (No hope of doing that with voice, of course, which would crimp her style quite a lot but might be manageable.) Has to be cross-platform. Leading possibilities include Zoom and Jitsi, but I have no idea how to integrate the MIDI with either of them.

Meanwhile, I note in passing that the shortages, especially of bulky things like toilet paper, are mostly not due to hoarding. All it takes is for a lot of people to decide to go to the store a day or two sooner, and buy a little extra "just in case". Stores don't keep a lot of stock on hand -- they rely on just-in-time shipping to meet a steady, predictable demand. So they run out, and that makes the people who missed it want to come in early the next day, and the "shortage" continues even while supplies are arriving steadily.

The same effect is at work in health care, only the lead times are a lot longer and the consequences of not having a sufficient backup stock of masks, face shields, isolation suits, and ICU beds has disastrous but entirely predictable consequences. </rant>

( Notes & links, as usual )