Quarantine random thoughts #23

The temperature should reach 31º today, which by London standards is “quite hot indeed”. Having failed to successfully launch Zoom Bikini Day™ with the rest of the team, I think I will just remove all my clothes between calls. Or move my workstation in the shower. Another advantage of working from home!

I’ve been back to Central London a couple of times in the last week. It was nice to go back, it’s still much less crowded than usual (all tourists are missing!).

Good old Horatio all by himself on a Saturday afternoon (later in the day the square was actually quite crowded with protesters).

I followed the WWDC keynote this week, had a good chat with Euan about announcements in an upcoming podcast.

It reminded me of WWDC 1995. My dad attended the conference, and when he came back to Italy he brought with him an early beta of the QuickTime VR authoring tools.

Two big plastic binders of documentation and a bunch of CR-Rom. It was the most exciting thing ever! We had to take photos with a special rig using a professional camera with very wide angle lenses, send out the film to be scanned on PhotoCD, then use command line tools to stitch photos together, slice them and convert the file into a QuickTime VR file. We actually made a business out of this for a while.

I have a special appreciation for how you can shoot pretty good panoramas on any phone these days.

Also, I went to the office to work with a couple of colleagues yesterday.

It was odd and familiar at the same time. We met because we had to shoot a short video, not really planning to go back to the usual routines. Since I’m flying back to Italy in a week, I don’t think I will be back in that office for most of the Summer.

Stay safe, be nice, keep in touch, and shoot a panorama of your living room, it will be nice to find it in a few years.