As I write this exactly at 10:40 on April 15, I instinctually feel like there’s some important deadline I’m missing, a day where I feel should have already done something. Is it someone’s birthday or an anniversary? Do I need to get an oil change? No, it’s the traditional tax filing deadline in the US.
While this year’s news has been dominated by politics and pandemics, there may have been a universe-shattering discovery made in the world of physics—one that may realign the very way we think about forces of nature. ‘Now this isn’t the usual e-sign, e-security chit chat,’ you may think to yourself. Yes, this week on Tech Essentials, we will be dealing with the nature of the universe itself, so say with me “whoa!” in your best Keanu Reeves voice.
If there’s one thing you should know about me (in addition to being obsessive about e-sign and e-security), it’s that I’m a proud parent. Recently, I was at the dinner table engaging in a lively debate with my daughter about current events, and I was thrilled at how she could piece together a cogent argument. Her logic was impeccable, and her presentation was compelling. However, when I asked her how she knew her facts were true, I got: “because I heard it on YouTube and TikTok!”. Another gem: “I read it on xyz blog.”
We at Tech Essentials had been hoping to have at least a one-week respite from any talk of COVID, and we were sooo close this week…until I saw an article about a British mathematician who calculated that, based on there being two quintillion virus particles with an average diameter of 100 billionth of a meter, all the COVID in the world could easily fit into one (empty) can of soda. That’s right. The source of all the world’s misery over the last 12+ months could all be fit into a common item probably on your home-office desk right now.
A year ago, there was a sudden “shock” to the world that caused mass disruption in people’s normal routines, forcing an uncomfortable behavioral change for most. This pandemic-induced shift to an isolated work-from-home (WFH) routine should become a shibboleth once vaccines flow freely. But perhaps it wont. Over the course of the last year, we’ve all acclimated to our new routines, comfy chairs, lounging in between “meetings”, kids-play at odd hours of the day, work-from-anywhere with a hot-spot connection… not too bad (assuming your profession or business was not too negatively impacted). This acclimation may be the reason why the way we work may have genuinely been transformed — permanently and in ways we’re just beginning to understand. To shift “back” to office parks, we’ll need an equally dramatic and “opposite shock” (i.e. an over-abundance of COVID babies disrupting home workspace, or who knows what.)
2021 may now be well underway. The government is starting to drop more money from helicopters, potentially trillions more upon the trillions already. I am not sure what this means for the Bitcoin crowd (I won’t bore you with my speculation on this unless you ask…). But, we at RPost and Tech Essentials are a hopeful bunch, and as I wrote in an earlier Tech Essentials post, we believe that the decade of the 2020s (the single year 2020 aside) could be unusually prosperous as we recover from the pandemic—keep in mind that the 2020s technically didn’t begin until Jan 1 of this year.
We’ve been living in/with smart homes for many years now. You can use Alexa or Google Home to dim lights, play music throughout your house and reorder milk when the time comes. And this is just the beginning.
2020 has been a year nobody will forget any time soon, and it presented every one of us with unprecedented challenges in our personal and professional lives. At RPost, we sought to adapt to these new realities by offering solutions designed specifically to help you, the user or potential user of our RMail® email security and RSign® electronic signature products.
Google suffered not one, but two outages this week, with its Gmail (among other Google services) going dark for several hours at a time. Many Gmail users reported emails bouncing back and other error messages. At their peak, these outages affected a vast number of users, many of whom seemed to be in Europe. The cause of the outages is, as of yet, undetermined, but your intrepid Tech Essentials staff has a theory…
On a recent all-company call, one of our American colleagues (who is not very soccer-futbol-football-knowledgeable) was shocked to learn of the passing of Maradona, exclaiming “But she was just working on a new album!” Maybe the sound quality wasn’t ideal, but such miscommunications are occurring with more frequency now in this era of working from home and having to use video conferencing. (Soccer fans on the call gave a chuckle😊)
