"New" Laptop!

I pretty much spent all afternoon Wednesday putting Mom's old desktop computer together to see if I could make it work for the rest of my classes. It was functional for the usual stuff but I wasn't sure how it would do with Zoom.

So on Thursday morning I fired it up and connected it to Zoom. So far so good, even though there was no video feed of me because there is apparently no camera on Mom's monitor; no problem. But as I sat through class I discovered that Zoom puts just enough of a load on the memory that 4 times in our 90-minute morning class both the video and the audio froze up. I had to close and reload everything. It took me 2 or 3 minutes to get back to the conversation and by then I was lost; I will have to listen to the recording of that session.

After lunch I got smarter; I ran the audio through my phone while the video was on Mom's computer; which still crashed 3 or 4 times during the 90-minute session. But I could still listen to the audio on my phone while I was reloading everything so I was not clueless when the video came back on.

In the evening I emailed Dr. Ric & Dr. C about how I would be showing up in their future classes. I also emailed my team to let them know I might not be able to contribute as much to our final project due to the ancient technology. After dinner I found that team member Justin had replied, offering the use of a spare laptop here in Honolulu! (Dr. Ric also tried to get me a loaner laptop from the program organizer, but Justin beat him to it.) Long story short; Justin's brother Alfred brought the laptop over just before the Friday afternoon class started. After class I got it up and running and can now access my emails and calendar from it so I can attend Zoom class on Monday! Mahalo nui loa e Justin & Alfred! (Justin is on the Big Island but the laptop was here which is why Alfred was involved.)

Justin's old laptop sitting on the desk in front of Mom's old computer.

For class today, our guest lecturer was Dr. Rebecca Romine. The morning session was on Ethical Issues During a Pandemic. Dr. Romine also taught the afternoon session which was on Health & Wellness During a Pandemic. There will be very few photos since I can't figure out how to change png files to jpg files in Windows 8 in order to insert them in to the blog. Just know that Dr. Romine is a great speaker and gave us tools to help us with taking care of ourselves during our time as contact tracers.

The Potential Most Favorite Roommate made dinner tonight; it was a holiday for him (and the rest of The Roommates). But not for Cohort #2! (Since it's an accelerated class, we don't have any down time.) He made chili; I think he put arabiki in it.


There were 230 new COVID-19 cases today, bringing the total up to 6072. Currently, 227 COVID-19 positive cases have been hospitalized; 44 in the ICU. Right now 49% of ICU beds are in use; Dr. Romine's lecture on ethics this morning touched on the subject of when the ICU beds are almost filled. What happens when 2 patients come in needing an ICU bed; how do you determine who gets the last ICU bed? Or a ventilator? Or other intervention when resources are stretched thin? That's the type of training we are getting. That's one of the many reasons why you can't just pull an out-of-work person off the street and put them on a phone to become a contact tracer. If it was that easy the training wouldn't be 6 weeks long!