30 Days In

One month ago, on Monday, March 16, 2020, six counties in the Bay Area, covering 6.7 million people in the cities of San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Mateo, etc., jointly issued the nation's first official "Shelter-in-Place" order dealing with the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic, to be effective through April 7 (unless "extended, rescinded, superseded, or amended in writing by the Health Officer").

A few hours later Santa Cruz county joined the Bay Area group, and by mid-week Governor Newsom laid down the law for all of California. Within two weeks from that, nearly every state was under some sort of official restrictions. Currently, the order is through May 3, but likely to be extended at least a few more weeks before restrictions start easing up.

Frankly, we knew this was coming, and we (my wife and I) were pretty well prepared to shelter in place starting with the weekend. Still, we went out Saturday night to see my wife's cousin who was passing through town. We were the only customers in the restaurant for much of the meal, but got great service and lots of attention from the staff. A "good" but eerie experience.

Then on Sunday we considered cancelling our plans, but went out because how often does a friend have a 90th birthday party? Hard to imagine at the time that it would be our last "social event" for (perhaps) several months. That was in San Francisco, and coming back down an empty Van Ness Avenue felt like a scene from the Omega Man.

On that Monday, one month ago, we were already hiding out when the official order came. Since then we've only been out for occasional trips to a market, and for near daily walks. We have bandanas we wear around our faces as masks on walks, and a limited supply of disposable medical masks for the market.

By the third day, I'd started doing a daily "Quarantine Hootenanny," quickly recording and posting to Facebook a song on guitar or ukulele. A couple of days into that, I started posting the daily songs to YouTube, and cleaned up my channel that I'd been neglecting for several year. In these thirty days I've already posted 28 Quarantunes and four old-stlye vlogs.

Other original vloggers from way back in 2006 also came back and started posting at about the same time, and for the same sheltering-in-place reasons, and it's been something of a fun reunion.

Other activities: board games (Scrabble, Monopoly), puzzles, cooking, eating, washing dishes...

Work-wise, there's not much. A board I'm on, to start up a new nonprofit in Santa Cruz, has moved our meetings online, and changed from weekly to semi-weekly, as things have slowed to an uncertain crawl in our launch plans. But enrollments in my on-line course have surged, as people with time on their hands are looking for something to do.

Perhaps I'll do a separate blog about the political aspects of this, and how perilously close this country is to completely abandoning any pretense of democracy and accepting a Trump dictatorship, but my point here is just to document my personal journey of trying to remain sane and keep our spirits up.

What is the sound of $1.65 billion going down the drain?

By now you know that I've been hooked on YouTube for a number of months now (watch my videos here). If you are also among the 'Tubers, you know that for some weeks now the site has been plagued by technical issues, mostly revolving around the messaging systems.

You'd think by now a basic email application would be easy to build into a site and keep up, but apparently not so. Worse than the constant error messages has been the complete lack of communication from YouTube staff on what's happening, or if there's any hope of a fix.

Enter LiveVideo.com. It looks an awful lot like YouTube, but the video quality is a bit better and the audio blows you away with full, true, stereo sound. Oh, and the messaging systems work.

This week it seemed like a mass exodus occured once certain notable 'Tubers began to promote their LiveVideo vlogs on the 'Tube. I, too, have claimed my username (kenrg) and started to cross-post my videos. A few people have made Farewell to YouTube videos and shifted over entirely.

(There have even been a few conspiracy-minded 'Tubers asking if LiveVideo could be a project of YouTube itself to test out new features before rolling them into the original.)

Now, today, YouTube has finally mentioned the technical issues on their blog, "Our engineers looked into it and discovered an over-enthusiastic spam filter." We'll see if that cures anything. It may be too little too late.

YouTube is still far and away the market leader when it comes to online video. But the ease and speed with which a small competitor can snag a large group of their users should be a wake up call to them. In the Internet age there are no customer loyalty guarantees. In the time it takes to shut down a site for overnight maintenance another site can cast its spell on your users.

Yes, I said I opened an account at LiveVideo. I like a lot of the features that they've introduced (and that wild stereo sound), but I'm not leaving YouTube yet. I'm still rooting for them to get their act together. I'm also betting on their new masters from Google giving them a swift kick in the pants.