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Zoom observations

2020-03-27 23:25 GMT

One week of Zoom classes later.

• The mute hotkey on Mac is Command + Shift + A. Easier than clicking.
• Is it bad to spy on other people's backgrounds? If they didn't want it to happen, why are they sitting in front of a ton of action?
• I can't read any book titles. But I can see some posters.
• I can also see people's mugs. Most of them are boring. Some of them have fun designs. One person shamelessly drank from a mug obviously stolen from Yale Dining. They don't live in Connecticut.
• People just feel much less real. I could just look over there. Or switch tabs. Pretend everyone is a YouTube video.
• It took until 10 minutes into my second class (two hours total into my week of classes) for someone to actually say the word "coronavirus" (or any variation of the name). People love saying "this whole situation" and "all this" and "what's going on" though.
• My voice is getting more monotone, because everyone else sounds more monotone even if they aren't in real life. If this true for anyone else, we've started a vicious cycle.
• One of my professors would always bring a cup of Starbucks to class back at Yale. Now I see him drinking out of a Dunkin' Donuts cup. F.
• He talked about his dog.
• He also has both Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer in his Windows bar. What a madman.
• Are breakout room people chosen by lottery? Or my professor? Lottery would be fun, and I wonder how my professor chose if it's not a lottery.
• I wish your settings stayed the same after you came back from a breakout session. I have to remember to remute myself.
• It's weird to know someone could be watching you when you're not watching them.
• Hand-raising is more organized than in-person seminar because everyone who wants to talk actually can, in the order they press the button. But what people say is way less responsive, because they're usually responding to someone many speakers ahead of them.
• My algorithms lecture is actually better, because he now posts the notes he writes in class online (previously they were on the whiteboard), and the lectures are now recorded (previously they were not).
• Zoom classes are better than I thought, but still bad.

I don’t want to write posts that just share other things, but this was really good.