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Day 9 – Thursday 26th March 2020

Routine is gradually emerging from chaos. I set my alarm this morning, admittedly for about twenty minutes later than when I go to work. I got up about 0645, had a shower, got dressed and was working by 0720. Over the course of the day I wrangled my inbox down from over 300 unread emails to just two. I also reorganised my folders to account for the pivot from political change to dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic. All that effort came at the cost of not doing any significant exercise today. As of bedtime I’ve only managed about 3,500 steps today, which must be an all time low for a day I wasn’t ill.

Technology or Environment?

Elsewhere in the household Lucy learnt how to use email and Google hangouts with her friends. At one point there were four of them on video on Tracy’s phone and Lucy was typing and email (very slowly) to one of her friends while they chatted and played games. In fact they only stopped when devices ran out of battery. It seems normal to them to play by video call.

There’s a school of thought that stuff you grow up with isn’t technology, but just the way the world works. That’s certainly the impression that I got listening to a bunch of Y3 girls play with each other from their own homes. At one point Lucy went out into the garden to show things to her friends.

Lucy playing with her friends on google hangouts, like she’s always done it that way! (photo: James Kemp)

The other thing I did today with technology was sort out zoom on the laptop that Lucy is using and also connecting it to the TV. We’ve only got two HDMI ports on the TV and both are in use, one for the virgin TV box and the other for the PS3 that provides us with DVD/Blu-ray playing and also access to smart TV features. This latter is a problem because it’s no longer supported for new stuff, and we want to be able to watch Disney+ on the TV. So this afternoon I ordered an Amazon Fire Cube, which will plug into the TV and play a range of streaming services, including Disney+, prime video and Netflix.

Food

Lunch was pretty hearty. We have a large box of Indian snacks from Iceland. So there were mini bhajis, pakoras and samosas with oven chips. More than I’d usually eat for dinner, but I can’t complain because all I did was turn up to eat it.

It being Tracy’s payday we had dinner delivered from a local takeaway. Partly doing a bit to help local businesses, and partly a treat. Tracy had a kebab washed down with Pimms and I had pizza with a Ruby Leffe. Both the kids had pizza too, although they had an Irn Bru and a Vimto. Tomorrow is the end of another week and I’ve started some pulled pork with another third of the massive pork joint I made yesterday’s pork wellington with. Still not sure what to do with the last third.

The start of some pulled pork, coated in barbecue sauce in the slow cooker. (photo: James Kemp)

With luck we’ve got a delivery of groceries coming tomorrow, but news from friends and colleagues suggests that there may well be gaps in the delivery.

NHS Clap

Bearing in mind that Tracy is a matron in the local hospital, we went outside at 8pm to see if anyone was participating. So we were pleasantly surprised by not only a lot of clapping up and down the street but also bells, pots and pans, and even fireworks let off nearby. It was a pretty positive expression of support for the NHS. Let’s hope people remember this next time we have an election.

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Day 7 – Tuesday 24th March 2020

For the first day of general lockdown the street outside my window was pretty busy. I saw several people make multiple journeys, and quite a lot of others taking their exercise on the green. More than I usually see when I’m working at home (I tend to look out the window when I’m on conference calls).

We decided last night not to sweat the schedule and to set staying sane and happy as our primary priority as a family. Tracy had today as her normal non-working day, and we all managed a lie in until about 8am. I got straight on with work while Tracy looked for Lucy’s tablet, which was last seen on Sunday. In the meantime I gave Lucy my tablet, and she and Alexander got stuck into the newly released Disney plus.

With Tracy off I was able to get quite a lot done, mostly reading in the morning, and several chats in the early to mid afternoon. This despite some IT issues with the worm laptop. Some of which were user error, and others bandwidth problems. I also got three texts from the government, two identical ones that I think every phone in the UK got telling me to stay at home. I also got one from DWP informing me that I’m a key worker and an essential part of the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Search for the Lost Tablet

Tracy was determined that she was going to find Lucy’s tablet. The last time that anyone remembered seeing it was Sunday morning. Lucy was certain that she’d had it in our bedroom. Yesterday we’d already looked in and under the bed, and on the bedside surfaces. We’d also looked on and under the sofas in the living room.

While I was firing up the work laptop Tracy had another look around our bed. It wasn’t visible, and we thought maybe it had been taken elsewhere. So Tracy went downstairs and moved the sofas and cleaned underneath them. All sorts of interesting things were found, but no tablet.

Shortly after that Tracy came upstairs and pulled everything out from under our bed and swept all the rubbish and dust that had accumulated between all the suitcases that live under there. At one point I came back into the bedroom with some coffee, where I was working in the corner, and all I could see were Tracy’s flip flops sticking out from under the bed. She was completely under the bed! Tracy found £1.35 in coins, but no tablet.

Freezer Diving

Frustrated by the inability to find the tablet Tracy went into the garage to see what we actually had in the freezer. We’ve run out of bread, and the next food delivery isn’t until Friday.

The results of the freezer Diving was an eclectic lunch. When I was called down to eat Tracy was eating some crab sticks. On the kitchen worktop was a pile of small wholemeal wraps, carrot and cucumber batons, hummus, salsa and a baking tray with a selection of Swedish meatballs, fish fingers, vegetarian sausages and a small pizza.

It was a case of last to arrive doesn’t get to choose. I was third in. So I had quarter of the pizza, some meatballs and salsa in a wrap, and a couple of fish fingers along with hummus and carrot. It was a pretty good lunch.

Technology Wrangling

While I ate lunch I plugged an external hard disk into Tracy’s Lenovo Yoga 300. It hasn’t been happy with Windows 10. So I copied all the music, photos and documents off it.

Later on, after dinner, I formatted the hard disk and installed Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS on it. Then I set it up with user accounts for Tracy and Lucy. It was a really smooth install and it was noticeably more responsive with Linux than it had been under Windows. The only functionality glitch was the right click on the trackpad didn’t seem to work. However a minute in Google revealed that it just needed a two finger click.

On my way back to work after lunch I had a very quick look for Lucy’s tablet. I thought about the behaviour of putting it down. Usually I try to plug it in, and I hate leaving it on the floor because there’s a high chance someone will stand on it. So I looked around. Tracy has a movable table with her sewing machine on it, so I looked there. On the lower shelf, under the box with the nail varnish, was Lucy’s tablet.

Tomorrow

I’m going to try and preserve my non-working day tomorrow so that Tracy can get more done. It worked pretty well for me today. I worked pretty solidly from half eight until six, and barely stopped for lunch.

I’ve got to make sure the kids get some school work in, but no more than they would normally do if they were at school. It’s pretty noticeable that Alexander’s teachers are pretty optimistic about what can be done in a given time. Messages on the mum network, and the teenager channels, show that everyone is on the same page. So there’s been some gentle pushing back on the school.

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Day 6 – Monday 23rd March 2020

My space for working at home, definitely not adhering to the clear desk policy! (photo: James Kemp)

Today was my first day back at work after almost a fortnight off sick. One of the things I read this morning was the NwSpk guide to remote working. Someone had suggested that we run a virtual workshop. While I’ve lost count of the number of workshops I’ve run over the decades I’ve always shied away from online workshops. They’re much harder to get engagement from people and need a lot more preparation than face to face ones. As a result of that guide, and a medium article, I’m more confident that I could probably pull it off.

School at Home

The other feature of the day was helping Lucy do some schoolwork from home. Alexander has already been at it for almost a week, but he’s in Y9 and is used to just getting on with it. Lucy is only in Y3 and isn’t really used to homework. The first hurdle was that her tablet seems to have disappeared, she used it yesterday morning but it was nowhere to be seen this morning. It has to be somewhere in the house, we haven’t been anywhere because of the self isolation we’ve been following.

So after we’d looked on and under both sofas, in and under the beds and on all the likely surfaces I gave up and set up reading eggs on my personal laptop. A big chunk of this was done while I was in hold to the department IT help desk, because my password change hadn’t properly synced and I couldn’t login initially.

Lucy spent a couple of hours happily doing Reading Eggs and made it to level 120, although I’m not sure what level she started at. After lunch (packet pasta, which she complained about sharing it with Tracy) Lucy switched to Mathletics. When I checked in with her she was competing in live arithmetic with kids from around the world (mostly UK, but also Canadian, UAE and Irish kids). Her class had a scoreboard on the home page, and she was on 1,138 points, a mere 8 points ahead of the second ranked kid. So I guess she’ll need to do some tomorrow!

At twenty past three Lucy called me down from where I’d been hiding so that I could work. When I got there she asked me if I knew what time it was. When I told her that it was twenty past three she then informed me that she thought school hours were over.

Games

The basic concept of Celestia is moving your pawn in a cardboard airship between the cities, and surviving the hazards to get to the end. (photo: James Kemp)

After a very lovely dinner of Chicken Parmigiana courtesy of the Pinch of Nom cookbook we played Celestia. It’s a 2-6 player game we got for Christmas in 2018. It works really nicely as a collective push your luck mechanism with individual scoring. The aim is to get as far along the path as possible without going down with the airship. If you land it as the last player inside you get treasure. All the treasure cards are slightly different values, and the average value goes up the further along the track you get.

Technology

The various updates must have broken something in my Apache web server configuration. Most of my websites were showing an internal server error (500). I needed to edit the site config files to make them work, despite them working fine until a couple of days ago without any changes.

The edit I made was in the Directory section, where instead of the full file path on the server I replaced it with the relative path from the domain root. No idea why that was necessary, but it seems to have fixed the problems.

The other technology fix I was at was trying to work out why my wife’s Lenovo Yoga 300 is so glacially slow. It’s been disappointing since we got it. So this evening I made a live USB for Ubuntu 18.04.4 and fired it up. Not surprisingly it was pretty responsive and the touch screen also worked fine. So I think the machine might be getting reformated shortly from Windows 10 to Ubuntu.

The next fix is to get Alexander’s laptop to open PDF and PowerPoint files from his school OneDrive. At the moment if he tries to open one it spawns hundreds of tabs in his browser.

Cancelling Holidays

The most depressing thing this evening though was not Boris Johnson announcing that we’re all on lockdown, everything is closed and we can only go out in dire need, or to exercise once a day. It was cancelling our planned family holiday to Denmark and Sweden in May. I cancelled the Airbnb I’d booked and Tracy moved the easyJet flights to October in the hope that we will still be able to go then. We also cancelled the hotel. Hopefully we’ll get a refund on it all, but we won’t know for sure for a few days. It was all booked a few months back, before Christmas for most of it. So we should be okay.