Wednesday, April 29, 2020

I Live My Life in a World Created by Zoom, Exploring Literature and Hobbies and Career on My Cellphone

April 29th, 2020 at 10:59 AM
Bridge Street near the Vermilion River
Streator, Illinois

I’m listening to a Zoom meeting. I attend at least three Zoom meetings a day. Last night, I attended a poetry reading featuring Jack Ridl, a famous professor who taught at Hope College. The Zoom stream stopped every five minutes. The stream stopped in the middle of poems. I had to keep logging back into the stream. I sat under the breezeway and watched the poet read and listened to the falling rain.

It was still good to see Ridl reading his new poems aloud. I haven’t seen him read in more than a decade. He has become well known as a poet. The poetry reading series that brings A list poets to Hope College is now called the Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series.

I found a Facebook Live presentation from the inventor of the Flow Hive, Cedar Anderson. He showed how to avoid the ten mistakes new beekeepers make. If you move a hive too far while the bees are away, the bees will fly to the old location and get lost. When placing a hive in a garden, it’s important to place it so bees won’t fly along walking paths. Five hundred people watched the presentation and hundreds of questions showed up in the comments.

He opened up a tap and a jar of honey poured out. He was standing on his patio overlooking a lovely lush tropical garden in Australia, talking to over four hundred people and extracting honey. It looked as easy as pouring oneself a beer or a glass of mead. Hundreds of Australians have started keeping honey bees and joining beekeeping clubs because the Flow Hive makes it simple.

I was just watching a Zoom presentation given by a company that makes software robots, UIPath. I found myself multitasking during the presentation, writing and flipping back to read new slides. I was raised to follow the eighty - twenty rule, twenty percent of a lesson is worth eighty percent of the learning. I’m sure that has caused me to miss out on a complete education, but it has worked to prepare me for eighty percent of the jobs I’ve taken. I read all of the slides carefully, so I hope I’m ready for a technical interview.

I was offered a job working with products from UIPath. I had different plans at the time, so I shared the opportunity with a few of my friends in the info tech business. I totally get the message of the seminar. For the country to catch up after two or three months of lost productivity and production, we’ll need robots to do our work faster than we can with human hands and eyes. I definitely have time to learn a new set of skills, so I’ll look into it. I’ve written macros before in a programming language called Visual Basic, so I might have an advantage.

I’m wondering if we’ll live the rest of our lives in Zoom rooms? I wouldn’t mind if I could take all my meetings under the breezeway, listening to the rain fall on the roof.

Cedar and Stewart Anderson, Inventors of the Flow Hive, enjoying the Aussie sun.

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