Hello everyone!

I thought this might be a good place for everyone to check in with their given situation - we are all sort of an extended family, dysfunctional and all - and it would be good to know how everyone is faring during this global crisis. Haven't seen some for a while, hopefully everyone is hunkered down safe and sound with plenty of TP!

For me - hunkered down in NC-USA. Working from home, mostly necessary goods and services still available, non-essentials closed. Drive up alcohol sales still available

TAG

Hi Frank and everyone,
Crossed thoughts my friend because this morning crossed my mind about start a post under this subject, I'm glad you did it.
I hope that every friend here, and relatives, are all well and safely at home.
I'm in Rio closed in the apartment with my wife and child, all fine as well as everybody in our family, here in Brazil and in Portugal.
In fact we don't have news about anyone we know got COVID-19.

I had relatives here visitng me that would return yesterday to Portugal but decided to antecipate to Monday (last week), fortunately they did it because that was the last flight to Portugal.

The city is empty and we can even watch TV w/o put the sound in the maximum because we live in a street with heavy traffic and by now it's completely free.
By now we are allowed and advised to go out only for walk the dog, exercise or buy essential goods.
Besides that, the toughest task is to give attention to Violeta (my 19 months daughter) every minute in the day, she never gets tired

We know that things will be much worst and nothing will be the same after it, no matter when that "after" will be.
This is a lesson to the World and I hope that something good could be taken from what will stand up after this tragedy.
I'm not seriously worried with me get infected because, believing in the statistics, for healthy people this will not be really dangerous but, I'm worried with my baby besides there are almost no records about kids got infected, I'm worried about the older members of the family besides they are well preserved at home but, what I'm really worried is about the social impact this will leave.
The govern, even leaded by a completely acephalous President, is trying to prepare the country to face the worst scenarios, it's a gigantic task due the dimension of the country and the absence of the basics for health infrastructures, if COVID-19 show that all the world was not prepared, imagine in Brazil.
So, if the measure in course to prevent the scalability of the infection will not be efective, I don't want to think if it grows in the same scale it did in the north of Italy.

Well, I could stand here talking about this but I have work to get done for tomorrow, until now, this virus, besides not computer based had the worst impact on my work due the extra tasks to put all Customers in homeoffice and a lot of extra tweaks for the craziest reasons

Dear friends, keep safe and take this seriously, I'm following the situation in California, Canada, New York, UK, Mexico, Italy and easily we can see that we are all on the same boat.

By the way, 2020 is supposed to be an A-Shell Conference's year

Hello Jorge! Good to see you, glad you all are weathering the storm. Very well stated my friend... hang in there hope to see everyone on the other side of this

Best of luck with the baby that might be the hardest task of all!

Glad to know y'all are all right...well partially alright for you, Frank. Here in LA (Lower Alabama) we're doing well. Being the oldest member of the family (but only by a narrow margin), I'm taking this pretty seriously. I only get out to go to the grocery and to get my neighbor's mail that lives down the street. She's even older than I am and isn't able to get out. We do have a patient in the hospital here in Montgomery about 2 miles away that has the virus, but have very few total cases in Alabama....at least reported cases. Hope all are being vigilant and they come up with a vaccine soon.

Yessir! Hang in there Herman ol' buddy!

Alive and kicking (or at least typing) here in Los Angeles... Like most of you, I'm fortunate to be able to work from home. And although virtually every customer I've communicated with is being affected, we don't yet know anyone who has tested positive or have any clients facing business closure. (I know plenty of people personally though who are suddenly out of work.) Like Jorge, we've had a lot of requests for special tweaks and inquiries about setting up remote users.

Also like Jorge, I have a family complication in the house, but it's at the opposite end of the age and behavior spectrum... My dad is in hospice in the adjacent room. (He needs a lot of attention too, but he's never not tired!)

Speaking of the 2020 Conference, Ty had set March 1 as the date to start thinking about possible venues - well, let's just say we're still thinking. It's worth noting that we met in 2006 in New Orleans after Katrina, and in 2008 in Savannah in the midst of the economic free-fall after the Lehman Brothers collapse, so maybe it's not entirely crazy to expect that we will be able to do it again after the 2020 Pandemic. Hopefully it will all be back to normal six months from now, but it may be a bit premature to start making plans just yet.

For now, let's all try to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

OK here. Our company has closed and we are fortunate that we can all work from home, so as much as possible carrying on as close to the previous norm as we can. Stocks of most goods in the shops seem to be recovering after the selfish, idiotic and unnecessary panic stock piling of a short while ago.

I hope the world will get through this sooner rather than later, with minimal loss.

Stay safe.

Any news on a virtual conference?

We've had a few inquiries, but no clear vision has yet developed of how we might do that productively. I'm not sure anyone wants to sit through (or prepare) video lectures on language features or programming techniques. There might be some possibility of arranging virtual equivalents of some break-out sessions for those interested in discussing particular issues.

Plus most of you guys will have be up at 1am -> 4am to be ready to start as I sit down and have my first coffee at work at 9am eager to start 😀

That's what you call virtual Jet Lag

Good point! Except you kind of undermined it by posting it between putting on your pajamas and getting into bed for the night!

Ah dam-it so I did. 😀

I'll be fine no matter which time zone we agree, considering that I'm usually awake in all of them
And I think we should go with the first Virtual A-Shell Conference, we can't be defeated by CORONA and lose this opportunity, otherwise we will be an old-fashioned community that didn't adapted to the new normal.
In advance, believing that Jack should have relaxed preparing his detailed presentations (like he usually does months before the conferences ) we could do it mainly in "chat mode" and each of us bring the topics to talk about. If we don't find anything interesting to talk about technical subjects, we just open the bar and will have plenty to talk under the theme "The era of the mad choices in elections/referends"

I should point out that although Jack does in fact do most of the heavy lifting with regard to conference preparation, there is also a fair amount of work that goes on behind the scenes in preparation. Always at least a few weeks in advance, and on occasion—when we're expecting big announcements or a tightly-packed schedule—a couple months, I have to start some serious drinking in order to be able to keep up with you all at the conference. This is not all fun and games, you know...

... no doubts about that and, this time, there will be no excuses for anyone not attend ;-)

Hey guys,
Everynights I remember you, in California, when watching the "hell" on the news but, always miss to ask about.
Anyone in particularly difficult conditions ?
I know Jack lives on the hills and Ty is not far from San Francisco (considering the extension of the fire) but, how safe you are guys ?

Thanks for your concern, Jorge.

My town, San Luis Obispo, is about 200 miles / 300 km south of San Francisco, and about the same north of Los Angeles.

We have had smoke and very bad air quality for more than a week, but there are no fires nearby. The smoke comes from fires about 100 miles to the north ("Big Sur").

We're close to the hills, but still have a pretty good buffer of flat land between us. And in this case, the biggest fires near us are not that near - maybe 50 miles. But with the wind pattern we've had recently, much of the smoke blows over us, so like Ty, we have horrible air quality. I heard that the West Coast has the dubious distinction of the worst air quality in the world right now. And I think LA is also enjoying(?) its worst air quality in history, but unbelievably, we're not even close to being as bad as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland (all of which usually have much cleaner air than we do.) But at least we have the option of staying indoors.