I am in a meeting right now with nine of my colleagues, most of whom are in the Boston area, but which also includes myself in Washington state, one guy in Colorado, and one guy in Utah. Everyone in the meeting is in a different location. In addition to the people in the meeting, the guy running the meeting is sharing his screen with information on the topic we are discussing. It works amazingly well. I regularly use three different video conference tools–Google Hangouts, Slack, and Zoom. Every now and then I also use WhatsApp and Skype, but that is mostly that is for personal stuff.

Over the last week, I got in a new microphone and speakers that have made these meetings a good chunk better. About a day after I got these new parts connected and working, my bluetooth headphones (Cowin E7) broke mechanically. This was pretty disappointing because I had been very careful with them, always carefully returning them to their case when they were not in use. I ordered another set of headphones (Plantronics this time) a couple of days. With the China virus, deliveries have slowed down pretty dramatically from Amazon and Walmart so they will not arrive until late in the week–probably Thursday. All my housemates have to listen to both ends my rather boring conference calls until they arrive.