Has it been four weeks already? Time flies when you’re not going anywhere!

We had lots of calls today, starting with our son bright and early at 8:30am (his lunchtime) and ending with a Toastmasters meeting on Zoom ending at 8:45pm. And we managed to walk, too.

My computer migration continues – I’ve made a backup on USB disk and it seems to work; I tried using an old backup disk (Firewire/USB 2.0) but I couldn’t make the new laptop see it at all – now I’m running it through a 7-pass erasure so I can throw it away safely.

And this evening, I’m having severe Internet problems – it comes and it goes, and even when it’s here, it’s not very fast (except when it is). During my Toastmasters meeting, Zoom did a great job of preserving the audio, but I was lucky if I got a frame of video every other second. I’ve rebooted my router, cable modem, and switches with no joy; I’m going to let it sit overnight before trying to contact Xfinity.

It’s always something!

It was Easter, so we didn’t have to decide whether to brave the Farmers’ Market because it was closed. And we didn’t walk in Downtown Los Gatos, either – all three of our walks were in our own neighborhood (as usual).

Our friend Dale led a mask-making Zoom class at Shir Hadash; she showed us how to make no-sew masks from fabric, pillowcases, kippot, and even a disposable mask using two coffee filters. She also showed how to sew masks according to the Kaiser Permanente instructions. We’ll be making some masks before our next trip to a store!

I did some work for Toastmasters and backed up my old laptop’s SSD so I can put the laptop in the mail to Apple sometime this week and complete the trade-in process. I also seem to have found a reasonable compromise between screen resolution and readability on the new laptop – I have it at 1680×1050 with several apps set to bigger fonts (the old laptop was 1680×1050 but had a 15” screen).

We watched the second half of Silicon Valley Shakespeare’s 2018 production of “Much Ado About Nothing”; it brought back nice memories.

But the sound had a lot of noise and distortion – I wound up buying a copy of Rogue Amoeba’s SoundSource 4 in hopes of notching out the worst of the noise, and it helped somewhat. Strangely, the first act (which we watched yesterday) seemed to have better sound.

I read the May issue of QST today; they were scrambling to include information about the effect of COVID-19 on DXpeditions, special event stations, and Field Day (as well as the cancellation of the Dayton Hamvention). As I was looking through the issue, I noticed one special event station had planned on operating at the end of May in honor of the “Mike the Headless Chicken Festival” in Fruita, Colorado; it seems unlikely that they’ll be able to do so, but reading about the festival brightened my day!

QST also reprinted their letter column from 1970, which was largely devoted to hams condemning or supporting the “National Student Information Net” which served as a clearinghouse for the National Student Strike that year. Politics was nasty then, too – maybe we’ll change some day.