sweasel.com

No Zoom, unless I absolutely have to, and then under a burner alias registered to a burner email/phone # and through a VPN set to a city 2000 miles away. Oh, and nothing remotely sensitive will be discussed.

Not I.

Wellington has a fantastic tail, by the way.

Had to resort to Zoom since Gargle is pulling the plug on Hangouts. Seems to work just fine. I get together virtually with a bunch of curmudgeonly Olde Phartz like myself to smoke good cigars, drink good Scotch and set the world to rights. It’s pretty much been my entire social life even before this episode of “The World’s Gonna End.”

Zoom – Way to often for my liking, for company team meetings.

Have yourself some fun with the virtual backgrounds. If you have a green blanket thingie make a green screen background for yourself, otherwise the feature tends to vanish parts of you into the background in an unpredictable way.

I got ‘best background’ during the last meeting, using the rec room from the Millennium Falcon. It’s got more visual interest than the bridge of an Imperial Star Destroyer.

The “Don’t Panic!” cover of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is another, and these days, particularly appropriate.
https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Blog_talk:%27Douglas_Adams%27_%26_%27All_Things_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy%27_by_Adam_Terrey?file=Panic.gif

And as noted above, that boy has an impressive tail. And I love the color shot, look at that face, he’s a bright one.

Not all computers require a greenscreen (green backdrop) to use a virtual background: my laptop does, my desktop doesn’t. Zoom will ask if you have one, and if you tell it “no” it will tell you if you need it.
I haven’t actually Zoomed–my practice involves relatively few face-to-face meetings. But I checked it out, just in case.
Oh–and in the US,at least, if you downloaded the free version, there is a 40 minute limit per meeting. . .

Now DurnedYankee, why not do it right next time? Grab a shot of either the Emperor or Darth for your next conference, and add a name tag with your boss’s name on it!

No Zoom for me. I’m trying to avoid Chinese stuff as much as reasonably possible. That ain’t easy these days.

Gab just announced an alternative to Zoom but I don’t know if it’s up and running yet.

That guy “Biff” Wellington is one handsome cat. Do you brush him?

My employer uses Zoom for virtually everything now. I’ve been to Zoom all-hands webinars with 500 people, useless Zoom meetings with 30 people, and a few useful ones with 3-5 people. It works well for what it is. Zoom got lucky by being flavor-of-the-month right now. Last year was BlueJeans, and WebX before that.

I loath video calls. I know the camera adds ten pounds, but how many cameras are in this fucking thing? To make it worse, the geniuses at Dell decided to put the camera at the BOTTOM of my laptop screen. Thanks for that, Dell NostrilCam.

I don’t use Zoom as my workplace has the full MS magilla and that means we meet in Teams. Not bad, they introduced the ability to change your background…last week I think?

As for cameras it’s interesting – as this thingy has gone on fewer and fewer are using them. Occasionally there’ll be a 4 or 5 person meeting and one will have a camera on and then turn it off after a few minutes. The sudden realization that everyone is probably looking at them as the only source of movement on the screen is probably creepy.

@Mark Matis – my ‘old’ boss did one better. He took a shot of himself sitting at his desk during a Zoom meeting and used it as his background shot.

Hilarity ensued for a minute or two when he got up and walked away during the meeting.

I’ve had a couple of Zoom meetings, the audio on my laptop is terrible so I turn off my camera and wear headphones. My old ears have trouble with discerning the conversation with too much background noise, it is super distracting when someone leaves their microphone on when they are typing or turning pages, chewing gum. Ugh.

No to Zoom…most of my friends are tech challenged or phobic, so we stick with Whatsapp.

@Durned…I sure do miss Doug Adams and Michael Crichton’s commentary. I often think of what they would make of today’s headlines. AMC (or Prime) is running 6 part series hosted by Jim Cameron on Sci-Fi in film. A bit of self-congratulatory director talk…but still interesting.

I’m re-reading “The Mists of Avalon” I must say that Guinevere is a twat. I hateses her. That is all.

I like his handsome tail, and I like his poochy whiskers.