Meetings become teleconferences, and teleconferences often become "well that could have been an email."

"Are you able to join the [moronic conference call that could have been an email] ?"

Wrong question. I am able to join, but I am not joining. And now I'm turning off my instant messenger too. This is why I'm still working on something that I could have finished three days ago if it weren't for conference call overload.

Your power washer, snowblower and riding mower want to have a conference call with my cat.

2020-04-22 14:11 from IGnatius T Foobar

"Are you able to join the [moronic conference call that could have

been an email] ?"

Wrong question. I am able to join, but I am not joining. And now I'm

turning off my instant messenger too. This is why I'm still working on

something that I could have finished three days ago if it weren't for

conference call overload.

Don't you love when they invite you to a video or audio teleconference that is totally unnecesary, and you show up anyway, and the conference crashes because the organizer and you are the only people who managed to set the software right?

Not weird software you have to compile yourself or any other user-unfriendly thing mind you. Software designed for end-users...

As IG knows I've been using these softwares every workday for 8-12 hours a day for about 10 years. None of them were built intelligently to handle this sort of scale, but in the overall most of them are decent and work. Some handle some actions better than others. Some are complete resource hogs (skype...). But you work with them over time, see what does what and pick a direction and go.

All of them have pros and cons.

* Microsoft Teams (aka Microsoft's dagger straight into the heart of Slack)
Scales pretty well. Seems to support most hardware. It was the first one that I saw which could blur your background without additional software.
Doesn't support participants using telephone audio unless you've surrendered your entire phone system to Microsoft. Insists on stealing my headset from whatever other application was using it when I join a screen share.

* WebEx (Cisco)
The perennial corporate favorite. Works pretty well, supports both computer audio and phone audio. Generally considered secure by corporate data security poindexters. It's expensive to use. During peak demand it can take 30-90 seconds to establish audio and video once you've joined a call.

* Zoom Meetings
This one is going gangbusters right now; they've done a great job of making it scale During These Uncertain Times (tm). It has the nicest set of background substitution tools, with or without a blue screen. On the other hand, it's pretty much universally thought to be insecure, actually prohibited by some corporate security groups (mine is one), and is known to have a direct surveillance path by the Chinese government.

* Facebook Video
Fuck you, I'm not joining your meeting.

Don't forget Skype, Google Meet, Google Hangouts. My last two jobs have predominantly used the latter two (which are nearly identical products, and work in Chrome without installing any native plugins.) We haven't had any problems except for the occasional audio feedback loop.

And don't forget "work laptop is deadz0r and I've got way too much cto do today to have to deal with this."

Hell no I'm not going to let the IT department put its spyware all over my personal rig. Now I've got to build a VM if I want to get any work done today.

I think that's the first problem. You shouldn't be wanting to get any work done today.

Zoom got a log of shit, but even with their adjusted numbers they grew a whole ton and became the video go-to for a lot of people, which meant they also became the go-to for evil people. Being a newcomer compared to MS and Cisco, I'm not surpised things got found, and it seems like they're addressing it pretty quickly and openly. I tend to be a pretty paranoid peson with regards to security, but maybe I'm just fatigued.

I think that's the first problem. You shouldn't be wanting to get any

work done today.

And I didn't. Things got progressively worse, partially my own fault.

I have the corporate desktop image on a USB stick, so I figured I'd just spin one up in a VM. It doesn't boot, not in UEFI mode, not in BIOS mode, nothing even recognizes it as a bootable stick. So I figured just to get some work done I'll boot it from bare metal and install it on a spare drive I happen to have in the machine. Upon booting I expected the "which drive do you want to install it on" screen, but the image is pre-configured to just start the installation immediately.

Eventually I got an error that basically said "Windows cannot be installed on this disk, which contained another installation that you were already using, but we've erased it anyway. Sorry NOT SORRY!"

Then I discovered that for reasons I still can't figure out, my backups were excluding anything stored on the Desktop. WTF?

I removed the M.2 from my work laptop and installed it in the desktop to see if it would boot. Didn't even find it.

And for the final knife in the back, after I reassembled the laptop -- having disconnected the battery -- it worked again when I powered it up. So I basically wrecked my personal rig for no reason.

I blame Facebook.

Then I discovered that for reasons I still can't figure out, my
backups were excluding anything stored on the Desktop. WTF?

Sorry to hear that, man.

I always do a full rsync dump of my personal computers using a Live CD, when the OS is powered off. That way I can check the important things are copied and I can ensure backup consistency.

rsync is my tool of choice as well. I combine it with daily COW snapshots using btrfs to achieve daily differential backups (or what Apple calls "Time Machine" in their version of the same). The problem was that rsync skipped over my Desktop folder when it copied my home directory, and I never noticed.
I still don't know why.

Lost from the desktop, and omitted from my backups, was the entire ten year collection of audio work I did for my friend who owns a dance studio. This year when we put together music for the recital, every time she asks "can you bring up so-and-so song that we used a couple of years ago" it'll be "nope, we have to produce it from scratch again."

I've also lost all the raw footage for several video projects, including the sequel to my generator video that has 1.8 million views. I lost other footage too, including my overhaul of the World's Oldest Power Strip, which cannot be re-acquired because I've already disassembled it and thrown away the old parts.

This is my fault. I should have kept an offsite backup. That having been said, my *onsite* backup wasn't destroyed; it simply didn't include everything I thought it included. I can't even blame Microsoft for this one -- their installer normally asks you which disk to erase -- this was our corporate image which goes ahead and erases Disk 0 without asking.

EPILOGUE: on Wednesday afternoon I got a call from the help desk, answering my request for assistance with a totally dead laptop that I submitted on Monday morning. I had already given up on ever getting help from them, as they had a zero track record of success to begin with, but if the machine was dead I would have had to get a replacement sent. Good thing I worked around the problem on my own or I'd have been unable to work for a week.

Epi-epi-logue: the reason rsync skipped my Desktop folder wasn't because of a bug or even a weird configuration. I simply ran out of space on my backup drive. :( Apparently the IGlet has been saving lots of video to the network (which I told him to do to avoid losing it if something happens to his computer) and it grew faster than I was expecting.

Epi-epi-epi-logue: after a few more problems with the work laptop, they're sending me a new one.