Hey! How you doing? Also a few updates from Paul (bloggity blog blog)
So things have been about the same here as they’ve been, but thought I’d give a little update on what all is happening over here and see if anyone felt like telling strangers how they’re doing.
TL;DR – there’s no interesting Android news today, the reviews I have are still ongoing, so Paul blogs. How are you doing?
Pocketables, has been owned by me for about two years now. We had a downward spiral when we were on Site5 due to multi-week downtimes, site performance, and also lack of a lot of daily content as, well, really, fluff ain’t fun and the advances in Android and Root have been a bit more far between.
People who write for Pocketables aren’t paid except by link referral (you like something of theirs, please donate/tip,) people who own Pocketables will eventually see the purchase price paid off in about 3 & 1/2 more years barring more advertising and site deaths. I’ll update the transparency page later, it’s just been a thing I’ve been avoiding as it’s kind of meh.
Numbers over the last two months tend to indicate fixing the massive load times has been good. Eh, we’ll see. I’ll talk about the new hosts next month and what they did as long as nothing explodes.
Many of y’all know I ran for Nashville’s Metro Council last year. This was an interesting experience. I do not think I have the personality to win generally as I didn’t particularly want to badmouth, and trying to explain that you just think you’d do a better job based on a skillset from a field few understand really isn’t sexy.
Due to that, and that I ended up with a lot of followers I ended up being elected president of my neighborhood association. Don’t think I’ve mentioned this on Pocketables before as I dislike cults of personality, and I feel that was the driving force for me being nominated with nobody else doing it.
Most of what I managed to do has been organization and getting some of the social media up and moving to more online. Good timing. We’ve had ~4-5 meetings since then and one was seriously in danger of being iced out, and the other was during what we’re suspecting was the first wave of Covid-19 as everyone in Nashville had some weird ailment that would not go away for weeks.
So, March 2 I fell asleep around 9 with the windows open. This was odd as I’m generally a midnight guy. Woke up at 4am because the rain was a little loud and closed the windows. Woke up to a text that schools were closed for a tornado.
My work was without power for a week or so, the tornado destroying buildings as close as 830 feet away. No damage to my work however. Kids were home for over a week. As I recall Maggie went back to school for two days one week, two days the next, and they called it for Covid-19 a couple of days before Metro’s spring break.

Nashville went into lockdown, and I had started writing a few weeks earlier daily about simple math that people weren’t making connections with on an epidemic for the neighborhood. EG how if each person infects two others before noticing they’re sick how long until the country reaches a million infections.
You know, because simple math is so much fun for people to read.
A had a weird 3-week run of being within 5% cases daily just on a simple compound interest calculation… then testing was too slow to keep up with it.
The kids have not played with another child since a couple of days into the Nashville lockdown. Zoom, FaceTime, duo, Google Hangouts, etc have been it. At one point the 4yo’s teacher came and talked to her on the other side of a glass door.

My work informed me I’m probably employed for another two months, and I somehow managed to get another extremely part time / short term gig in the interim. My wife’s work put out a call for anyone who wanted to retire early, or be furloughed to step up. She’s probably good for another month at least.
Beyond that it’s been project city. Every project I’ve not had time to do in the past 8 years was accomplished in mid-April, and we’re onto the projects that needed done since the house was purchased now.

What have you been up to in the unexpected downtime, or increased uptime for some of you?