This morning, we took a docent-led virtual tour of the Levi Strauss: A History of American Style exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum that was offered through Shir Hadash. I would like to go to the museum to see it in person, but that will be a while (they plan to keep the exhibit open through the rest of the year, so there may be time).

The big news today was a message from the Post Office: At long, long, long last, the webcam I bought from a random Facebook ad from a random seller in China was here! It had gone from Brisbane, CA (near here) to Des Moines, then slowly made its way back to Richmond, CA, and finally (finally!) to our Post Office and thence to me.

As soon as it arrived, I opened the package, plugged it into my Mac mini, fired up Zoom – and nothing. Zoom didn’t see the camera. Neither did the System Information report. And there was no indication in the system logs that anything happened when I plugged and unplugged the camera.

I tried another Mac – same lack of results.

Then I noticed that, while the ad I’d followed to buy the webcam and the outside of the box both talked about working with Mac, Windows, and Linux, the teeny-tiny instruction sheet inside the box only claimed Windows compatibility. So I plugged the webcam into Diane’s Windows laptop; Windows installed a driver, and seconds later, I was greeted with an incredibly blurry picture.

No worries – this camera advertises variable focus and the instruction sheet even shows the focus ring. I turned the focus ring and (you guessed it) nothing happened. The picture remained blurry.

Oh – did I mention that the ad claimed 1080p resolution but the box and the instruction sheet both said that the camera had VGA (640×480) resolution?

I’ve opened a complaint with PayPal.

One of my Toastmasters clubs, Silicon Valley Storytellers, celebrated its seventh anniversary this evening with a story slam. Instead of the usual Toastmasters format of speeches, impromptu speaking, and evaluations, we had thirteen members give a five-minute (or less) story and voted on the best three. I volunteered to be timer.

The challenge for the timer is getting the storyteller to stop if they go over time. When we meet in a room, we use a bell and applause – the timer rings a bell starting at 5 minutes, and a few seconds later, everyone applauds. Even the most stubborn speaker takes the hint.

But on Zoom, things are not so easy. Zoom does a lot to keep feedback and noise from happening – one of those things is reducing the output volume for anyone who’s speaking (at least if they’re not using headphones). So when we did a dry run, we discovered that the speaker could not hear me applaud if they were speaking!

So we used the nuclear option. I used colored backgrounds to give the speaker time cues at 4, 4-1/2, and 5 minutes; if the speaker didn’t stop talking within a few seconds past the 5 minute mark, I muted them. I only had to mute one speaker (the first) – after that, people watched for the red signal and stopped quickly.

There were a couple of other technical issues (one person muted herself just as she was getting to her punchline, and someone had to call in because her computer microphone refused to cooperate), but things went relatively smoothly, and the stories were interesting. Some might even have been true!