Excursions

I received a call from my daughter’s school today, enquiring if all was well with her online schooling. I was left completely clueless on how to respond to that.

My daughter’s school has enabled schooling of 5 subjects via an app. Each week, the app presents a new set of chapters, worksheets, quizzes across all 5 subjects. Besides, each week there are video conference sessions with teachers to recap what was learned in the last week.

Sorry to report, but just two weeks in, this process already seems overwhelming. It is especially so given both me and my wife are working from home.

I knew we weren’t alone. AP published a brilliant article on how parents in the US are already getting burned through this distance learning — something that is especially tricky with young kids. And they are forced to make a very difficult choice.

Amid the barrage of learning apps, video meet-ups and e-mailed assignments that pass as pandemic home school, some frustrated and exhausted parents are choosing to disconnect entirely for the rest of the academic year. Others are cramming all their children’s school work into the weekend or taking days off work to help their kids with a week’s worth of assignments in one day.

It is just not easy. Parents aren’t trained to be good teachers. The technology was never given a chance to prove it can work independently for teaching. It was always an additive. Plus nothing, nothing can replace the in-person learning from the people who are trained throughout their lives to do that. The comment below from one of the parents is very, very apt.

This is a very crude bandage we’re putting on a very big wound. We’re just doing the best we can. A video can’t look at your child’s face and see the confusion. A teacher can do that.

I recently came across this brilliant article at Quartz at Work suggesting to “move beyond “how are you doing?” and get more serious about the questions we’re asking our colleagues, friends, and family”. It presented a list of questions that one should lead with while talking to others.

I thought I will try and attempt to answer a few of these myself. Maybe you can give it a try too. And if you do, I would like to read how you are dealing with this challenging moment. Here’s my attempt.

How are you taking care of yourself today?

Listening to music — spending some time with myself. It’s been some time that I did that. I used to do that very often. Of course, it was a lot easier to find some lone time. Not that easy any more.

What part of your shelter-in-place residence have you come to appreciate the most?

The corner with my study table, I am happy that I spent some significant time designing it while I was renovating my home. And another room I like to go relax in now and then is the bathroom.

What surprising thing have you been stocking up on (that isn’t toilet paper)?

Body lotion — I do not know why, but I have got many of them now. And biscuits. I never knew I liked biscuits so much.

What’s a story — from a book, a movie, an article, a conversation — that you’ve been gripped by recently? Why did it capture you?

All the stories of sacrifices that get published every single day — when the humans have behaved just the way they should. It has been rare to read about recently.

What habit have you started, or broken, during the quarantine?

I have fallen out of the habit of writing the morning pages. I know I shouldn’t have. But for some reason, there isn’t much that’s different that every new day dawns with.

I have fallen into my old habit of listening to the music — lots of varied music.

I am not listening to podcasts. Or Audiobooks. I am reading lots of books.

Which specific place in your neighborhood are you most looking forward to visiting once this is all over?

Every part of the neighborhood. Everything that’s outside. That’s crowded. The streets. The restaurants.

What’s the easiest part about the quarantine?

Finding stuff to idle the time away with.

What are some things you have realized that you don’t really need?

Air conditioners. Cash.

What’s something you own that feels useful?

Internet. Kindle. Plants and Garden.

What is your COVID-19 nickname/alter-ego?

The chatty, social one. I have been part of many zoom meetings, few even those where I knew no one on the other side.

What problem—either yours, or something more global —do you wish you could solve?

Illiteracy. Stupidity. Rebelism.

In today’s time of confusion and uncertainty, safety of the food, our essential need, is equally important. Serious eats has a brilliant essay on just this topic. I think the writer or me are not alone who are troubled with all these concerns, and the essay is must read in that regard.

Even so, plenty of folks—myself included—have been confused or curious about the safety of allowing restaurants to continue preparing and serving food. Is it actually safe? Should I reheat the food when I get it home? Is it better to support local businesses by ordering food, or am I only putting workers and delivery people at risk? And if I’m cooking my own food, what guidelines should I follow?

E-paper (or e-ink) displays have the unique property of not needing power to maintain an image. Once a charge blasts across the display and correctly aligns pixels full of black and white balls, everything will stay where it is when the power turns off, so the image will stick around. You might not have thought about it before, but in addition to data, NFC comes with a tiny wireless power transfer. This display is designed so that NFC provides just enough power to refresh the display during a data transfer, and the e-ink display will hold onto the image afterward.

Fascinating use of available technology. This would be brilliant for passive viewing - for dashboards or billboards or all sorts of boards that do not need regular change of content.

I was completely surprised and equally frustrated, to read the only NYTimes reporting of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the nation. “PM urged citizens to stay at home to dissuade Hindus Pilgrims to flock to the sacred site of Ayodha,” the report read.

Here’s the full transcript of the PM’s address to the nation. I do not find any political or religion-based overtones in the speech. Why, then, should you report as if there is?

The PM called for “resolve” and “restraint” from citizens. I think same is needed from publications. These are not the times to be on the left or the right of the political spectrum. Let’s all first come out of this pandemic together as unscathed as possible. There would be a lot of time again for the political debates.

Is there anyone who can easily find the one emoji that they do not use very often? How many of the 1500+ emojis can one possibly use? There is a limited set of emojis I use regularly. And because they are front and centre every time I open an emoji keyboard, they tend to get used even more often.

Even the way they get categorized is horrible. Which category do you think you will find a loudspeaker in? Objects, you say? What about a balloon? Now the answer to that might differ based on which platform you use. Android puts it under “Activities” while iOS puts it under Objects. Not just do the emojis vary across platforms, even the simple thing like how to categorize them varies.

I think the emojis need a better, simpler replacement. I do not think memoji is that - it calls for too much effort before one starts to use them. Maybe the whole emoji set needs a complete reset. Anyway, how many of the myriad face emojis can you correctly identify and use? Do you know how many we started with? Just two - a smiling face and a frowning face. Now that is manageable.

Login to your Google account and access the activity controls.

Find the “YouTube History” section and switch off the setting. Also, make sure both the checkboxes in the section are unchecked — the first one is about the videos you watch and the second one is about the searches you make on YouTube. You do not want recommendations from either. And apparently switching the whole setting off does not disable both by default.

Click on the “Manage Activity” setting and clear all the activity. You can also consider setting it to automatically delete after every 3 months.

(And while you are at it, you should also consider pausing the location history tracking. This does not break any of the Google services.)

You can also make the “Cinema Mode” as default on your video controls. This should leave less space for related/similar videos recommendations from YouTube.

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It is easy to get addicted to YouTube - unknowingly spend hours clicking through the myriad of recommendations that algorithms through at you. The experience sucks. I have been burnt many a time. So much so that I spent a month off YouTube this year. It helped.

But staying off YouTube completely is difficult. The above steps have helped me not stay glued to the app for hours. I either access the video directly (if I know what I want to watch) or browse my Subscriptions page (when I don’t know what to watch). The home page is useless without history turned on. And so are other recommendations. Trust me, you do not want them.

Spotify has one job: make a great music player. They execute. Their app has none of these problems. It’s fast and bug-free. Spotify delights.

Even I had recently switched to Spotify. I believed Apple always nails an experience - so they would even for music listening. At least, they would do a better job than other players. But I was wrong. Spotify is far ahead, especially with playlists and recommendations. They rarely get it wrong.

As a side note, I always wonder why companies struggle while designing good music apps. It is such a simple use case, however most fail to get it right.

Note: I was recently held back by the 10th prompt of Microblogvember. I couldn’t come up with a satisfying subplot. I asked my 6-year-old daughter to tell me a story about space. This is her short story — I believe she has a better plot than what I could come up with. She always beats me with her creativity and freedom of thought.

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There once was an old spaceship. No one used it. Everyone wanted to use the new spaceship. The new spaceship had too many lights and it flew fast. So all new people wanted to use the new spaceship.

Some old people were talking once how they wished they could go to space and see the stars from close. The old spaceship heard them, it felt sad. So it took them to space. It showed them the stars and the moon. The old people felt very happy.

Some young boys did not like those old people were also going to space. So they stole the old spaceship and hid them. The old people felt very sad that their friend was stolen. So they searched for the old spaceship everywhere. But they did not find it.

One day they got an idea. They announced to the young boys that they have got a very new spaceship. They should come and take it from them. The young boys came to take the new spaceship. But they fell and all the old people held them.

The young boys got afraid and gave the old spaceship back to them. The old people were happy that got their friend back. Now they went to space every day with the old spaceship.

I am on a journey to consciously reclaim focus from the shambles of the distracting digital world. As part of the process, I have started actively following one more routine - I log out of every social media service once I have used it.

I have, since long, not had any social media apps on my mobile device. This has helped me reduce the subconscious pick-ups of the device. At the same time, it was really easy to access the service in a browser. Especially because it is just one tap away in my favourites. That’s as good as having an app on my device.

To deter these, I now log out of every service from my browser once I have used it. So, every time I am tempted to access any of these services, an additional step of logging in is needed. There’s also an added barrier of two-factor authentications for the services that support it. Cal Newport aptly captures this sentiment of mine.

By removing your ability to access social media at any moment, you reduce its ability to become a crutch deployed to distract you from bigger voids in your life.

All and all, this one step alone of logging in every time is enough to fool my lazy mind to stay away from these “crutches”. And hence not subconsciously spend any time on the services.

Update: I have already gotten rid of every social media platform I do not need (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat). I am active only on Twitter and Micro.blog. To reiterate, my logout routine is applicable to every site that serves feed of some kind. Including email, feed readers, instant messaging platforms etc.

Besides, I have started accessing these social services only at my desktop browser in Private mode (the Incognito mode in Firefox). So even if I forget to logout, it does not matter. Once the window is closed, all my session information is lost.

I believe this change should also help me from a privacy perspective. The belief is the cookies from these data-hungry social media services would not follow me as I browse around the Internet.

Can’t they? Won’t they? That’s a whole different discussion. But overall am spending a lot less time absentmindedly scrolling these stupid feeds. I feel a lot less burdened thanks to that.