Now Archive: May 2020

  • 4th May 2020
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  • 4 min read

This is my Now page and here’s what’s up for me these days (as posted on 05/04/2020). For my current Now page, go here.

I’m grateful to say that I’m doing fine through the continued pandemic. Yes, I had a scare in March, but I’ve been out of self-quarantine since then. All indications are that I was not sick from Coronavirus, though I will get the serology test as soon as it becomes available in my area, and I don’t regret playing it extra safe. My popular blog posts here and here describe my direct experiences in March.

More recently, the last of my grandparents died from COVID-19. My 92-year-old grandmother Mary Jane Garcia never did get a respirator. The shortages are undeniably real, folks.

I continue to go out once a week, mask and all, to gather supplies and run errands for my immuno-compromised partner and her 84-year-old mother. Other than that, I don’t go anywhere. But that’s actually alright, because I live in a beautiful place where Spring is springing, the birds are chirping, the garden is growing, and life is actually very good.

So I alternate between being outside and being behind a computer. It’s generally more computer time than I prefer, especially since they keep breaking on me (again!). Here’s what I’m working towards in May:

  1. Hosting online conferences & events I’ve been producing sessions for training industry legend Bob Pike, with several more trainings and webinars coming up soon. This weekend I’m helping produce The Alchemy Lab conference, as well as moderating a panel on podcasting and delivering a session on video production. And next week I’ll be deep in delivering the STC Summit conference. More on the horizon after that! In between, I’m helping musician/teacher/author friends make their tech work better for online delivery. I’ve got a ton of experience livestreaming, leading webinars, and teaching online. I never thought it would be the main thing I do, but I guess this is the main thing I’m doing in May. How ‘bout that now?
  2. Marketing & Coding for Energy Utility Group an energy broker startup in Austin. My title is Marketing Director, but I’ve been banging my head against some code for over a week now. So I’m hoping it will give way soon so I can get back to the marketing part of Marketing.
  3. Writing/Consulting for Cox eLearning Consultants, providing marketing content & strategy to learning & edtech companies. I’m writing blog posts, providing marketing strategy, and advising an LMS company on structural gamification.
  4. Reworking my network because my Razer Blade 15 melted last week. After frantically rebuilding and recovering data, I’m back to a 2011 MacBook Pro for the moment, which I’ve suped up with a new SSD and 16MB of memory. As I wrote about recently, I’m rethinking everything now, and will likely be building my own desktop PC soon. I did just get my NAS up finally, happily running TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS) with Plex, Nextcloud, and BackupMyPC plugins — just not very well yet. So my Raspberry Pi is still doing that for the moment. I hope to get all this straightened out this month sometime!
  5. Taxes & Finances are still looming from 2019. I really needed that extension, but I also really want to get all that cleaned up to current by the end of the month. Like many of us, I’m living on borrowed money now. In times like this it is critical to keep on top of the money flow. I have some work to do here, pronto.

Hopefully I’ll get to do some fun stuff this month too, like maybe venturing up the canyon and camping out while looking for my long lost drone. Or making some more new music.