How to stay sane ... when things change.

From an e-mail I sent to colleagues, I thought I should also share it here (revised):

I'm known as the office optimist. And I do literally have many things to be grateful for. I still have a job, I’m able to work from home, and I have a decent study setup. And I’m an experienced introvert, this shelter-in-place business is no problem for me. I feel like one of the last people who’d go stir-crazy.

But recently I felt I had a crappy week. Worst in some time, and nothing really to do with current events. A vital piece of software kept flaking out on me, and I felt I didn’t achieve what I was aiming complete.

I opted out of an attempt at a virtual Friday Happy Hour for related reasons, even though I timing worked out that probably could have given it a go.

In hindsight I understand this is also in part due to a number of reasons I just made up for myself, to justify “not coming”, such as feeling like the audio will be awkward, or even just setting up the video/audio feed.

I’ve been listening to a few select podcast to keep up to speed with current events, Deep Background with Noah Feldman being one of them. But this particular episode from 27th March, "How to stay sane during a pandemic", seemed to have been a fly on my wall. I found it really hit the nail on the head, and I feel there’s messages in there that will speak to all of us, from a professor in happiness, no less.

Noah interviews Laurie Santos, from The Happiness Lab. Well worth the listen.
https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/how-to-stay-sane-during-a-pandemic/id1460055316?i=1000469702285

I hope you’re all doing ok.

Oracle APEX @ Home

The world has obviously lost a number of in-person conferences in recent times, but luckily we have people like Martin who asked the APEX community to jump, and they responded "how high?"

And out comes 24 hours of 24 speakers with APEX @ Home, on April 16th 2020. A lot of regular speakers appear to have pulled out some awesome sessions, and then there's my dinky one on APEX logic suggestions.

It's an AskTOM Office Hours session, so it's also recorded for later viewing, but you'll miss the chance for live Q&A.

And you'll also miss the challenge Connor put out there - to get a virtual selfie with all 24 speakers. Good luck with that.

What I've wanted to do, but haven't had the time, is roughly plot the time zone differences for each speaker. I'm talking at 8pm, but I bet it's all over the shop for every speaker, at various times of the day!