Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Working from home

As a person whose job doesn’t really suit the mythical work-from-home paradigm - tech support at a university - the notion of having no commute and working from the leisure of my very own desk was not something that crossed my mind often. Not that I wouldn’t want to try it, but in my line of work, being remote is a disadvantage; computers are best troubleshooted in-person, when I can see and manipulate exactly what’s going on.

Well, the coronavirus is the paradigm shifter that keeps on giving. Within the span of one week, San Francisco State University took all its classes completely online, and effectively barred any non-critical personnel from coming to campus. All of a sudden, I was thrust into a role I’d thought would never happen: helping faculty and students with technical problems while sitting in my room. What once was thought impossible: converting the whole university to remote education, we now try and make the best of it, using the wonderful collaborative technologies such as Zoom and Slack.

It turns out, tele-troubleshooting can be effectively done, just in a wholly different sort of way. How you disseminate information goes from conversational to almost entirely in typed words: writing concisely and conveying difficult tasks using common language become the skill to have and develop. You’re force to be creative, too: the physical barrier of not being able to meet up is something we must navigate around, and on certain problems it’s a supreme challenge. For example, it’s not so easy to exchange a laptop that won’t power on when you don’t have access to backstock.

I have to say it’s been fun to come up with new solutions to these challenges, and it’s been a great learning experience thus far working from home. It’s also really nice to be able to climb out of bed, sit on my task chair, and already be ready for action. The one thing about “normal” work that I don’t miss at all is the dreadful commute. However, I do miss being at the actual office, seeing my coworkers, and the social collaboration that can only happen in-person. Video conferencing is great, but physical face-to-face interaction is crucial in our area of IT support.

There’s at least one more month of working from home to go. As with most things in life, I’m going to enjoy the process while it’s here.

Well well, how the turntables

As an Asian person who’s had a habit of casually wearing face masks when going outside, it’s funny to see that America has finally embraced it as a mechanism to decrease the chances of catching the coronavirus. Who’s the weird person wearing a medical mask now? I’m not saying I’m enjoying the schadenfreude of western countries finally accepting something that’s been a part of the culture in Asian countries for longest time, what with these dire circumstances and what not, but I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it, either.

It seems so basic and obvious that wearing face masks helps to decrease the spread of viruses and flu strains: otherwise, why are officials giving us tips like sneezing and coughing into our shirt sleeves, and to avoid touching our face? A face mask does brilliantly to preempt the need for those preventive actions, doesn’t it? Not only am I not spreading my own germs towards others, but I’m also (somewhat) shielded from the expelled particles of other people. This was especially useful when taking public transportation, and screw those who gave us Asians weird stares and hateful looks during the infancy of the COVID-19 outbreak for having face masks: we’re protected - that’s what matters most.

Anything that may help against a coronavirus that doesn’t discriminate between age or health status is worth doing; like playing the lottery, you can’t say for sure how severe symptoms will be should you be unlucky to catch it.

The example set by Asian countries like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, how they didn’t have to shut everything down because one, they had enough testing, and secondly, there’s a fierce habit of mask wearing already ingrained into the population. What did the western would do with this information? Much like their preparation for the coronavirus outbreak overall: absolutely nothing. It’s was only recently did the CDC reversed their stance and began to recommend face covering when heading out in public.

I get it, we should do everything we can to provide enough stock of masks and other protective equipment to frontline medical staff. That said, the general public should’ve be reprimanded for buying them for ourselves. Good thing though I already had a stash of face masks from before the virus hit our shores; I’m Asian, after all.

Eggs, bacon, and seaweed: the lunch of quarantine champions.

Back from the slumber

Hello, Internet friends. I hope you’ve been well, and the people you love are well, too, given the current circumstances we find ourselves in. It’s been nearly a month since I’ve written on these digital pages, and indeed it has taken that long for me to return to some form of normalcy. Things happened so quickly: from the first news of the coronavirus making it to the San Francisco Bay Area, to the enacting of the shelter-in-place directive that’s been extended to the beginning of May. It was a mad dash to get everything in order for the extended home-stay, the major one being the transition to working from home.

When you are confined to the house every single day of the week, the days do seem to blend in together. You’d wake up and have no idea what day of the week it is, needing a fumbling of the phone to tell you that it is Saturday, a day that you don’t need to login to the web portals at work. For a time, there was no normalcy to be found, even if home life and work life started to become consistent. Because I am consciously aware that it’s not okay on the outside world, no matter how nice it is to jump out of bed and right to the front of the computer screen to start working.

But I’m immensely fortunate; my line of employment at least provides a work-from-home option, rather than the alternative that millions of Americans are currently facing: getting laid off. I try hard to not take this for granted, and it only takes a few scrolls of the twitter feed to remind myself that there are far worse things that can currently happen than being stuck at home, virtually assisting people with the intricacies of Zoom meetings.

As terrible as it may sound, last week was the first time this new normal felt okay, and I was then ready to return to the habits I kept before this whole coronavirus thing happened. Perhaps I may have used the virus outbreak as a crutch and excuse to be lazy, but it wasn’t a complete waste: I took some of the time to get my mental health in order (I finally got around to a bit of Alan Watts). The anxiety is very real, and even though I’m an introverted homebody at heart, the need for everybody else to also stay at home is not something I particularly enjoy.

One of those habits is of course writing on this blog the standard four times a week, and starting today, I’ll be here to fulfill that self-prescribed duty. I’ll catch you all tomorrow.

SFSU cancels classes

It took one extra day then they’d probably wanted, but San Francisco State University - my employer - has suspended in-person classes for the rest of this month, due to the ongoing coronavirus threat. All instruction will be converted to remote and online starting next week, while for the rest of this one, staff and faculty is to prepare intently for that change, and the other affects of the prolonged campus shutdown.

You didn’t think I’d be free from the duties of work, did you? Plane tickets are cheap, sadly…

The horrible situation in Italy shows the potential chaos should the coronavirus be mishandled. While the circumstances in San Francisco are still in its infancy we should be doing everything we can to prevent a sudden and exponential increase in cases. That includes limiting or eliminating the opportunities for people to gather, such as crowded workspaces, and classrooms at schools. Of course, individually we should wash our hands thoroughly and often, while refraining from touching our faces with bare hands.

When this coronavirus business is done and over with (relatively quickly, we pray), I think it’s going to create paradigm shifts in different industries, perhaps lasting ones. Take for example universities taking classes completely online: what if a sizable amount of people - both students and teachers - discover that taking classes remotely and asynchronously is actually rather awesome? For a commuter campus like ours, who wants to sit in traffic for an hour, then fight desperately for parking, just to take one class for the day?

If enough people prefer the online method of attending class, I suspect there will be a big shift towards it even after things returns to normality. Support staff like us would benefit, too, because supporting remote classes using online ticketing systems can be done anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. The flexibility to work from home is not to be discounted lightly, because the commuter campus label for SF State doesn’t only apply to the people attending, but for a large portion of the staff as well. I have a colleague who travels all the way from Stockton; every single day.

Things are changing; it’s going to be a weird few weeks.

It's here

So things aren’t going well at all in San Francisco, as the coronavirus have finally reach this tiny peninsula of ours. As of current count there’s nine total cases, and if trends are to go by in other countries (Italy’s Lombardy region went from outbreak to complete lockdown in the span of a week), things are going to get worst before any corner is turned.

Meanwhile, I still have to go to school today, even though one of the guidances for preventing coronavirus contraction is social distancing. I guess packed lecture halls filled with students are quite okay. Hey, you only die once, am I right?

And I’m not saying we should shut down schools for a few weeks just because I would benefit from not having to physically go to work. Taking all classes online is no easy task, and I happen to work at the department that would be in charge of sorting it out and troubleshooting any potential issues. Should the campus close down, I’m not going to be chilling at home watching car videos on Youtube or taking the GT3 out for a spin - there will still be plenty of work to do remotely.

I did take the 911 out this past weekend for its weekly exercise, after performing a quick repair of a small plastic piece on the front underside. It’s been over two weeks since I took the car out for an extended drive, so on Sunday I had a fun and glorious four-hour stint covering nearly 200 miles in and around the San Mateo mountains. As I’ve said before: these high performance sports cars tend to be more reliable when they are driven regularly, getting the internals and oily bits up to operating temperature. It’s the ones that sit for months on end that skew towards having problems.

The long stint in the GT3 left me surprisingly exhausted, which is a reminder that my fitness is not what it used to be and needs to be. I think more cardio and going back to running is needed to gain back some of the lost endurance. That’s going to be tough to do in the interim with the coronavirus going around. It’s probably best for the rest of this month to stay home as much as possible.

Let’s see how the rest of this week develops.

The 200,000+ miles Type R

As I was browsing the daily Bring a Trailer newsletter yesterday, I noticed a 2001 Acura Integra Type R got sold for a relatively measly $16,000. My first thought was the car must’ve got some miles on it, because clean samples of the legendary Type R machine have ranged from the $30,000s all the way to $70,000s for the absolute best example. Interested, I clicked on the auction, and turns out that particular car has over 200,000 miles on it. That means someone has put that many miles on an Integra Type R, a car more famous for its tendency to get stolen than its fabulous FWD handling prowess.

What an inspiration, and it does bring a smile to my face.

I’ve always advocated for putting miles on our fun cars: they are effectively useless being sat in garages. It’s sad that some people see sports cars as investments, that the best way to preserve a car’s value is to store it and keep it shiny. Therefore I take some schadenfreude glee in seeing the recent trend of Porsche GT cars dipping in value: lots of super low miles, practically brand-nw GT3 and GT2s are being sold on Bring a Trailer for $15,000 to $20,000 in depreciation, instead of the well above MSRP levels they were trading just one year ago.

You thought you were going to make some money on that Cayman GT4, didn’t you Squidward?

Porsche really cratered the secondary market by upping production of GT cars tremendously in recent years, because the brilliant engineers at Weissach want these cars to be driven and used, rather than treated as gold bars to be traded for gains. I have to give the same kudos to McLaren: the company seems bent on making great cars, with zero regard for the resale value of its pass models. Let’s leave the wiping with baby diapers and haggling over the value of options to Ferrari owners. The rest of us will keep on driving.

My own 991 GT3 is about to cross the 30,000 mile mark soon, and I only hope I’ll get to take it through 100,000 miles and beyond.

There might truly be a (coronavirus) emergency soon.

We're being surrounded!

You know, you stop paying attention for a few days and then all of a sudden the coronavirus is knocking on our doorsteps here in San Francisco. There’s confirmed cases now in Santa Clara, Alameda, and just yesterday, Berkeley. It’s as if this tiny seven by seven mile peninsula of ours is being besieged and taken hostage. Soon it’ll be our turn to face the consequences.

At least the citizenry is ready if the shelves of the local Costco is anything to go by. This past weekend the Costco our family goes to was at its busiest I’ve ever seen, as people clamor to stock up on the essentials before disaster strikes. Cart after cart of toilet paper and bottled water can be seen coming out of the store in perfect procession just as we were entering, merely looking to buy our usual week of groceries. Kudos to the power of Asians, as the rice section was completely emptied of product.

Earlier in the week I was at a Lucky’s and the entire stock of hand sanitizers was gone, though curiously there were plenty of antibacterial soap left. I guess people can’t be bothered to wash their hands even in the face of a world-wide pandemic.

I can understand stocking up on toiletries and non perishable food items, but why bottled water? What does a viral disease have to do with the water supply? This isn’t a Ra's al Ghul situation in Batman Begins: tap water will still run and be fine to drink should there be a home quarantine order. Maybe Bay Area citizens got it mixed up with earthquake preparedness and bought bottled water on instinct, which I guess isn’t a bad thing because they’ll be ready when the next ‘big one’ hits.

To prevent contracting the coronavirus, we’re being told to wash our hands frequently and to not touch our faces. I’ve no problems with the former because I’m an avid hand-washer; the first thing I do after getting to work is wash my hands, because public transportation is full of germs. However, not touching my face is proving to be difficult, because it turns out I do it frequently: a rub of the eyes, a scratch of an itch. I’ve made a conscious effort to use the sleeve of my shirt instead, but habits are really tough to break.

Stay healthy, my friends.