Moving to an Online Existence in Trichotomy

Silver Linings

With a pair of vaccines having been approved, here and cases spiking everywhere post-Thanksgiving, we have been hunkering down more: we don’t want to be 林美香. A few weeks before Thanksgiving, we started going to the dance studio for in-person dance lessons, but after two lessons, we went back to virtual lessons because the cases started to spike again. There’s a silver lining to doing this virtually; we did a year-end showcase (it’s like a student recital for the studio), by submitting a pre-recorded video of ourselves doing our routines in the house, so we could do two takes, filmed from multiple angles, and pick the best one. During the showcase we didn’t have to be anxious about having to perform.

I’m liking the new computer, but didn’t manage to use it at my musician friend’s year-end streaming concert/party (ended up using La Professeure’s laptop because I can adjust the camera angle). It was okay, but if I want it to sound really good I’d have to invest in a professional mic, which i won’t. There is some silver lining to doing virtual concerts - some of our old friends who’d moved out of New York can now participate, so it was nice to see and hear them. Also, we can perform movie music to live image - I played the married life montage from Pixar’s Up to the footage of the movie, so it was nice. I also tried out Stars and Stripe Forever, seeing how I’ve been fat dumb and lazy for 10 years.

I had an agreement with my manager, that even after things go back to normal, I’ll probably still work 3-4 days a week from home. He himself said he wants to work from home for 4 days a week but recognised that his manager role means he’ll have a lot more meetings to attend in person, so he’d expect only 3. Also, my group is downsizing (because of our division’s shifting priority), so we only have 3 people on the team, and one of them (the TL) in Missouri, so there is not much point being in office since ⅓ of our team is remote anyway.

I don’t mind being locked in at all, especially since it doesn’t affect me - I don’t like to be around people, don’t mind the lack of commute or the extra sleep, or having time to write here. I realized I haven’t had headaches since the lockdown, I’ve been eating less (not necessarily better), and lost over 20+ lbs.

I should be the last person to be given access to the vaccine.

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Continuous identity

One of the nice things about keeping online diaries is that you can make copies of them and archive them easily. I’d come across the diary I kept as a teenager, and have started digitizing it to keep (it’s falling apart now). What’s surprising is that I’d only kept it since 15, even though it felt a lot longer. This means I’d only kept 8 years worth of physical diaries and 20 years of online diaries. I suppose when you’re under 20, 8 years is a giant chunk of your time.

Reading those entries, it does feel like it was written by a different person. I’d have a strong sense of continuous identity; when I read the early entries of NDS on OpenDiary, I can remember being that person, but when I read the physical diaries, I had a more difficult time remembering.

Maybe it has to do with the change of environment and surrounding culture.

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Online Collaboration Exchange

One of the pet projects I’d been wanting to do for the amateur musician group is to replace their collaboration exchange. Our founder had a spreadsheet to track everyone in the organisation who is interested in collaborating; we call it the Collaboration Exchange. Every year, he would ask members interested in collaborating to send him their information: what they play, what they like to play, what they are looking for, etc., and he would put it in the spreadsheet, and publish the existing one to the membership.

It worked pretty well in the first couple of years, but very soon it got out of date. Half of the entries are not correct anymore - the spreadsheet include people who don’t live in New York, no longer part of the organisation, picked up a new instrument, improved their skills, etc… The e-mail program we now use archives the message in public, so everything on the sheet, including sensitive information like members’ e-mail, will be public information once we send it. And we only send it out once a year, so if you happen to join after this year’s version is sent, you have to wait a year to get the next version.

So during the holidays I started working on the online version of the collaboration exchange. It’s not too hard to do: after two days of hacking (including the time to research online authentication and cloud databases), I already have a proof-of-concept. But, during the lockdown a relatively new member who got some ideas about expanding the exchange, to make it not just a place to find collaborators, but also to form collaborations. So he wanted to be able to specify a piece he wants to play, and solicit people to fill the slots. That got me to think, that we should hide the private contact information from members until both express interest in collaborating with each other. Then, I realized:

I’m writing a dating app.

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Last updated December 20, 2020