Pandemic Projects in Trichotomy

We went upstate to visit La Professeure’s parents last week. It was our first post-pandemic visit. I’ll write about that later but it was the surest sign that we are slowly returning to normal, so I’d want to take stock of what changed during the pandemic. A lot of traditions were started during the last 15 months…

Tinder for Musicians and ENT-bot

By far my most ambitious pandemic projects were the ones to modernize my amateur musician group’s operation. Upgrading the Collaboration Exchange from an Excel spreadsheet living on our organizer’s computer to an online webapp backed by serverless database will provide greater transparency, convenience, ease-of-use to our members.

I had been frustrated at our original organizer’s lack of responsiveness to our request for performance slots before, having experienced, and known people who’d experienced, the blackhole that was our oraganizer’s e-mail, but it was only after ENT pianist took over that I realized how much time that daily grind of replying to request for performances takes up. So ENT pianist is very happy to see the ENT-bot project launched. It was launched last week, and we already have people using it to sign up for performance slots. A member wrote to me directly to say how impressed she was with the tool. ENT pianist is announcing it to a wider audience this weekend, so it should see more use.

I had fun building those tools as well, and I learned how easy it is to stand up a small-sized cloud service. Coding in javascript was a change of pace from what I usually do for work. I open sourced both projects, so other amateur musician non-profits could also use them.

Hopefully, they’ll turn out to be useful.

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Writing

The next most important thing is writing here again. I guess I write maybe once a month? Nothing that interesting, really, but it’s nice to have a record of this time.

I hope to continue writing here, but I surely don’t read as often… A lot of my reading used to be done during commutes, which I don’t really do anymore since I’m working from home full time and we’re expected to work in person only half the time when offices reopen.

You’d think that staying at home would mean more time to write, but no - it just means we are doing less and there’s less to write about.

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Cooking

I have a Google doc containing links to recipes of dishes that look not too difficult to make and I would like to try out. As I end up trying them out, they get moved to a “completed” section, and I’d know to come back to them. But as I encounter more recipes, they get added to the “untried” section, so throughout the lockdown there are just as many untried recipes as there are completed ones. (I’m going to try to make crepe Suzette tomorrow; it should be fun - there’s supposed to be some flambe-ing, which makes me uncomfortably excited).

But I’m glad to be trying out cooking, which is something I never thought I’d do. When I moved to the States my parents were adamant that I should learn one or two recipes. I don’t remember what I made; I only remember them criticizing the bits of food I’d burnt. So that confirmed for me that cooking is a highly risky endeavour, and I’d never tried it other than making ramen and cooking eggs.

I cooked a little when I lived by myself in San Francisco, using a recipe book called “Cooking for Dummies”. But now, with the internet and with the pandemic, both the need and the opportunity to try out new recipes increased. So far I am enjoying it, but I am struck by how little the chef actually does - 99% of how good food is depends on the ingredient you get.

Cooking really is what I thought when I first moved to the States - you put food in a container and apply heat.

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